Between changing consumer trends and technological advances, the digital advertising landscape is getting more complex. The proliferation of channels, devices and formats present more touchpoints than any one marketer can effectively manage alone.
“I’ve talked to CMOs from Canadian companies who are creating hundreds of assets for their campaigns,” says Sabrina Geremia, VP and country managing director at Google Canada. “It’s really difficult to do that manually.”
Fortunately, marketers have new tools to help them meet those demands. Generative AI (GenAI) is helping marketers match the speed of their customers and get in front of them at the right time and with the right messaging.
“I see AI delivering on the promise of media and personalization at scale,” Geremia says, noting that advances in AI are helping marketers automate some of their daily tasks, optimize performance and drive business results.
Google first made AI products available years ago, long before generative AI became mainstream. But Google’s latest efforts are making AI more widely available to marketers, and helping them incorporate the tech across their campaigns on the platform.
Sabrina Geremia, VP and country managing director at Google Canada
Today, Google’s AI-powered advertising tools can automatically create and edit many of the creative assets clients need for their campaigns. With Product Studio, marketers can enhance visual assets on the go. The free tool uses generative AI to help advertisers create new product images, or edit existing ones, so they can easily scale campaigns across channels and reach more customers.
Similarly, with Ads Creative Studio, brands can quickly build multiple versions of their YouTube video ads and customize display ads for different audiences. For its Summer Insider Report last year, Loblaw used Ads Creative Studio to create 16 variations of a single creative asset for YouTube. Each ad featured unique messaging and AI-generated voice-overs, enabling Loblaw to reach different audiences in a more personalized way.
Geremia believes AI-powered tools like Product Studio and Ads Creative Studio will help marketers be more efficient. They “unlock creativity,” she says, by assisting marketers and giving them more time to focus on strategy and big creative concepts.
Already, 80% of people who have used Product Studio say the tool made them more efficient or that they expect to be more efficient in their work by using it, according to a Google survey. And more than 25% of YouTube video advertisers (overall) have used an automatically generated video in a campaign.
Other Google tools have changed what’s possible for measurement and campaign optimization.
Performance Max uses Google AI across bidding, budget optimization, audience targeting and creative to maximize campaign performance. Marketers share their budget, creative assets and campaign goals and then Performance Max automatically aligns, produces and runs the ad campaigns across all of Google’s channels, including Display, Search, YouTube and Gmail.
Advertisers who use Performance Max campaigns achieve over 18% more conversions on average at a similar cost per action, according to Geremia. “It’s delivering more results for the same amount of money.”
Cosmetics giant L’Oréal picked Canada as one of its first test markets for Performance Max, using Kiehl’s as a pilot brand. The campaign delivered a 78% increase in return on ad spend and a 49% boost in revenue. Based on that success, L’Oréal expanded the effort across all of its brands in Canada and saw average revenue growth of 44%.
There’s also Demand Gen, another campaign type designed to drive consideration in the mid-funnel on channels like YouTube Shorts, and Broad Match, which applies Google’s AI tools to match ads to relevant searches by accounting for context and misspelled words.
Geremia says she likes to frame AI for marketers as a suite of tools that can free up time “to do big thinking that only you can do as a marketer, creative or CMO.”
“See them for what they are – tools that will assist you and continue to evolve,” she notes. “Put on that mindset of continuous learning and lean in.”
In most organizations, marketers have been the first out of the gate to explore, implement and see the results of AI. That’s giving them an opportunity to shine in their organizations, and it’s helping CMOs stand out among leaders in the C-suite, she says.
She cites an eMarketer survey that shows CEOs are seeing CMOs in a more positive light, thanks to their knowledge of AI. “It has given marketers a front-row seat into the AI transformation – a head start on understanding the changes that are going to come across other parts of the org.”
For more information on leveraging Google’s generative AI tools for marketing please visit:
Gemini for marketing handbook download
And continue to watch this space: 2024 Google Search Honours Awards nominee shortlists coming September 17th.
