The Lumière theatre in Cannes was packed for Google’s keynote presentation in Cannes as two company execs espoused the virtues of its AI technology to turn “the marketing process” into an “all-at-once efficiency and growth flywheel.”
Srinivasan promised a faster rate of production, tailored media activation and real-time measurement with all the factors working together to drive performance, though she conceded it would take a few years to get there.
Google’s Gemini AI would help marketers generate insights and ideas, she explained.
“Media Monks uses Gemini to get insights on target personas for Hatch, the makers of devices that help you sleep better. They just provided Gemini with a target audience and asked it to create personas, rank the top three and provide insights into each of these personas’ behaviour,” she added.
AI would also be a boon for creative production. While Google had previously created AI tools to offer marketers more variety in creative assets, Google’s AI will soon be able to generate on-brand creative assets with detailed backgrounds and more artistic expression. It is even working on an image-to-video tool, with an example below.
When launching the Pixel 8 phone, Google’s own marketing team used its AI to create 4,500 different ad variations that ran across YouTube, Discover and Gmail.
“They generated more clicks and drove higher engagement,” added Srinivasan.
But what does that mean for you? Will you ever leave the office again? B&T asked Vidhya Srinivasan, the company’s VP/GM of advertising, exactly that after the keynote.
“You get time back in terms of efficiency,” said Srinivasan.
“An analogy would be what happened when people stopped running their own data centre and moved it to the cloud. All these systems are up and running all the time but with a cloud, somebody else is managing it. What happened at that time was that all these IT people had a lot more time to experiment with things that they would never have had time to.
“It drove businesses faster. A similar thing will happen in this case as well. You get more time but you also get the ability to do better. But everyone’s now doing better so everyone’s starting point goes up a little bit.”
Google entered the advertising market just after the turn of the new millennium, launching Google AdWords selling ad space at the top of search results. However, the business has transformed in recent months and years. No longer content with selling ad space, Google seems set on doing the brunt of your creative production and ideation with its AI tools.
Certainly, it isn’t alone in the market with these new ambitions — look at Adobe and Meta, for instance — but its relentless focus on the creative side of digital media at Cannes certainly seemed a change of pace for the company. Rather than talking about reach and results, it was talking about art.
Alex Chen, creative director at the Google Creative Lab told us that this new focus was in response to consumers changing demand, rather than a direct call from agency land.
“The AI Roadtrip, that idea was born from seeing that fans would actually reply with tonnes of ideas and we in-house realised that we have the AI capability to create it. At Google we get to play with the latest models and we realised that we have the capability to experiment with a new kind of system to respond to that,” he said.
“I know for my team that we really want to respond to human needs and wishes. This one was really from the response. If fans weren’t loving these videos and commenting on them, it almost wouldn’t have been worth our time to do.”
Chen added that while concerns had been expressed up and down la Croisette that AI will mean that creative folk won’t need to talk to media bods any longer — with creative iteration and adaptation handled by the likes of Gemini — that this wasn’t the case at all.
“It’s hard for me to answer but I didn’t see that happening in my team. I had strategic thinkers, producers, creatives and nobody felt that they suddenly didn’t have to do anything any more. They were all hanging out around this new tool that they had created together. The producers were hooking up Unreal Engine and even though we had a 3D artist in the room, they were excited to be hooking up this animation software — there wasn’t a sentiment of ‘Oh wait, is this suddenly going to mean I don’t have to hand animate things any more?’” he said.
Back on the Lumière stage, Srinivasan closed the talk with a rallying call for creatives (or perhaps some rousing words aimed at reassurance) telling them that they will “continue to be the difference maker.”
“You will still be the ones telling amazing stories, you will determine the messaging strategy and ultimately, you will built the meaningful connections with consumers. The role of creative directors and creative strategists will be even more foundational moving forward,” she added.
“Agencies have a very important role to play in guiding clients through this AI transformation. As we say at Cannes, this is your moment. But truly, it’s our moment to build this future together.”
Cue applause.