WPP & Google Tie The Knot On AI-Powered Effectiveness & Targeting

Google and WPP have announced a new partnership that will see the global advertising holding company use Google’s AI tools to gain deeper audience insights, improve targeting and optimise campaigns on the fly.

The collaboration was announced on stage at Google’s Cloud Next event in Las Vegas. It will see WPP integrate its Open AI-powered operating system with Google’s Gemini AI software.

The companies said that “By combining Google’s expertise in data analytics, generative AI and cybersecurity with WPP’s end-to-end marketing capabilities, global creative scale and understanding of its clients’ brands, this partnership seeks to drive a step-change in marketing efficiency and effectiveness.”

WPP’s Open software is already used by more than 35,000 of its people and adopted by key clients including The Coca-Cola Company, L’Oréal and Nestlé.

As part of the collaboration, Google Cloud’s generative AI tools will be used with WPP’s proprietary marketing and advertising data. This will enable WPP’s clients to create brand- and product-specific content using gen AI, to gain deeper insights into their target audiences, to accurately predict and explain content effectiveness, and to optimise campaigns with ongoing adaptive processes.

The pair said that the inaugural phase of the partnership is focusing on the development of the following four innovative use cases:

• Enhanced creativity with WPP Open Creative Studio
  • WPP has integrated Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro technology into Creative Studio, its gen AI app that is part of WPP Open and which helps with tasks such as writing headlines and turning a sketch into an image. Gemini 1.5 Pro’s large context window, which allows it to run one million tokens of information consistently, means that more brand content and guidelines can be used for prompts, such as a brand’s colour palette, fonts, voice, and even past marketing campaigns. This enables the development of much richer and dynamic user interfaces, and by understanding the brand better, more creative and on-brand content can be developed.
• Smarter content optimisation:
  • WPP has upgraded its AI Performance Brain – a service that uses AI to predict how well marketing content will perform – by integrating Gemini 1.5 Pro to improve the way the system predicts the success of marketing content, even ahead of campaign activation. This upgrade makes predictions faster and far more accurate, and enables reasoning behind the predictions, which offers superior recommendations to improve content. This powerful tool has the potential to free up millions of dollars for brands to re-invest in only the best performing campaigns.
• AI narration:
  • WPP is taking video description solutions to the next level by pioneering real-time streaming capabilities for both description and narration. The system uses Gemini 1.5 Pro to automatically create customisable video narration scripts. These scripts are then sent to ElevenLabs, a WPP partner, which generates a realistic voice for the narration. This process makes video creation faster, more efficient, and allows for a personalised touch.
• Hyper-realistic product representation:
  • WPP is redefining product representation using gen AI to create better product images. This system uses Gemini 1.5 Pro and Universal Scene Description 3D file formats to not only understand a brand’s style guidelines (logos, fonts, colours, etc.), but to also incorporate an actual product’s shape, design, and packaging. The result is a detailed 3D and brand-compliant product image that’s perfect for marketing and advertising.

Stephan Pretorius, chief technology officer at WPP, said: “This collaboration marks a pivotal moment in marketing innovation. Our integration of Gemini 1.5 Pro into WPP Open has significantly accelerated our gen AI innovation and enables us to do things we could only dream of a few months ago. With Gemini models, we’re not only able to enhance traditional marketing tasks but also to integrate the end-to-end marketing process for continuous, adaptive optimisation. I believe this will be a game-changer for our clients and the marketing industry at large.”

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said: “AI has the potential to unlock new levels of effectiveness for marketers, whether it is optimising campaigns, automating repetitive tasks like brand descriptions, or sparking entirely new ideas. This partnership brings the power of Google Cloud’s gen AI capabilities together with WPP’s deep marketing domain expertise to help our mutual customers create better campaigns that resonate with consumers in a deeper way.”