Two of Google’s biggest strengths: AI and advertising, are taking targeted marketing to spooky new heights

Love it or hate it, the fact remains that AI is disrupting the Internet as we know it. If OpenAI is the poster child for this movement, Google is the billboard on the side of the bus. The company’s Gemini AI tool is now hard to miss, but it doesn’t exactly inspire hope. Much of this perception can be explained by Google’s prioritization of its AI efforts: the company aims to quickly monetize these tools and integrate them into its vast product portfolio. Now, Google is highlighting two efforts that should further solidify public opinion.

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In a post today featuring Google VP Vidya Srinivasan’s speech at the Cannes Lions festival, the company revealed that it sees huge potential for generative AI in the advertising sector. “First, we can use AI to generate audience insights,” Google explained to potential advertising partners. “Second, we can shorten and scale creative production to bring ideas to life faster.”

While surfacing insights such as customer interests from huge databases has long been AI’s forte, using the technology to create actual ads is still a fairly new concept, which is why Google highlighted the potential of its latest video generation model, Veo, for use in ad creation.

As part of a larger initiative called Demand Gen introduced last year, advertisers who buy space on Google’s network have access to a set of AI tools to conceptualize and create ads for Gmail, Google Discover, and YouTube. As we reported in April, Google has now extended the program to YouTube advertisers as well. In a post today, the company revealed that it’s using its proprietary tools for ads on its Pixel 8 series, generating impressive revenue. 4,500 unique ads It’s been on YouTube for the past few months.

Google is using AI in more advanced ways with its “Best Phones Forever” campaign

Most smartphone marketing that tries to position its product against the iPhone ends up being frowned upon by a large portion of its target audience, but Google seems to have struck the right balance with its “Best Phones Forever” campaign, which portrays Apple’s flagship as the Pixel’s clueless best friend in a series of playful encounters. While the audio is probably machine-generated and the video is definitely CGI, the series isn’t particularly focused on AI. But that could soon change.

In a post earlier this week, Google announced “Best Phones Forever: AI Roadtrip,” the latest in the series, which features a twist: Instagram Reels viewers can post comments suggesting locations for a smartphone road trip, and Google’s AI will create a customized video response to the comment “within minutes.”

The campaign ran for just 16 hours and is now over, but Google’s primary goal wasn’t to sell phones, and they hoped the stunt would inspire other advertisers to explore their own “creative applications of these technologies.” Google’s implementation used Gemini 1.5 Pro to generate scripts based on commented locations, Imagen to create background images, and Cloud Text-To-Speech to process the dialogue. The rest was done by real humans using Unreal Engine, but tools like OpenAI’s Sora and the aforementioned Google Veo will soon eliminate this step.

With these developments, Google’s vision for the future of advertising is becoming clearer: targeted marketing based on user data will become even more targeted, and generative AI will be at the heart of it.