Google has always been an innovator when it comes to AI – largely because they were one of the few outfits with the money and the data to do so. But now with ChatGPT and a whole host of alternative generative AI models on the market, Google has been put on the defensive.

Up until now, Google had used AI to power its ad platform from predictive algorithms to smart bidding to responsive ads. But these applications were black boxes that users couldn’t fully understand or play around with themselves. For advertisers, PMax was a welcome innovation but suffered from these same problems. 

Now, in order to better compete, Google will have to put more AI in the hands of the users and lift the veil on how the inner workings of these systems operate.

Google Marketing Live just wrapped this past week, and I’ll give you a wild guess as to what the main topic was. In just 23 speeches, AI was mentioned more than 150 times. More specifically, the event centered on the use of AI to supercharge three tenants of marketing – Customer Connection, Creative, and Confidence.

Let’s take a look at what that means for marketers. 

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Customer Connections

Consumers and their journeys are all over the place. They’re doing more research than ever to make purchase decisions and across more channels than ever. At the same time, however, impulse purchases have seen a huge jump as buying goods and services online has never been easier. 

With this incredibly wide spectrum of customer journeys, it’s never been more important for the right ads to reach the right audience at the right time. Google wants to incorporate AI to help advertisers accomplish just that. One new development to be released later this year applies AI to adjust ad headlines in order to better match users’ search queries to increase customer confidence and satisfaction.

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Creative

When we talk about generative AI, most people’s minds immediately jump to written content or rendered images. Developing text, images, and video through intelligent applications is now easy, inexpensive, and fast. Naturally, this is going to be a huge emphasis for Google moving forward as they have to compete with droves of competitors looking to capture the market for top-quality asset generation. 

Beyond using AI to generate copy, keywords, and custom images to include in your ad campaigns, Google also plans to assist advertisers in developing short-form video ads. The quality of these is still a question mark, but their idea is to bring every possible part of campaign development under their roof. 

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Confidence

Marketing teams have enjoyed a surge of KPIs, metrics, and other measuring tools to draw insight from, yet the confidence with which many of us execute digital marketing has remained somewhat stagnant. Whether due to poor data, integrations, or indeterminate reporting, it’s not always clear-cut when your efforts are generating positive momentum. 

Google hopes to solve this issue by using AI to securely feed data into Google Ads, garner more relevant insights with greater ease, and improve the accuracy of measuring each metric. This way, you have clearer visibility into how your campaigns are performing and can act with confidence when deciding how to invest your dollars and your time in future efforts.

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