Now Google wants to be your creative director

Here we go then: Google is planning to introduce generative artificial intelligence (AI) into its advertising business. The tech giant intends to create ads based on material supplied by marketers and others.

“Generative AI is unlocking a world of creativity,” the company says. In a recent presentation to advertisers it claims it can “remix” content including imagery, video and text to provide addressable ads (ones which are tailored to individual consumers.)

The new technology will be embedded in Performance Max, a Google programme that uses an algorithm to determine where ads should run and for how much, as well as producing simple ad copy.

There will, Google says. be “guard rails” to ensure that nobody (Google most likely) gets up to anything it shouldn’t with the new tech.

Most of the ads you see on most media (Google’s YouTube, off-peak TV) are such crap it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference if they were produced by AI, or six chimps with a typewriter for that matter.

The interesting (and possibly alarming) thing about this is that clients will be able to write their own ads as opposed to interfering with others better qualified to do it. The ad holding companies will probably love it, think of all the money they’ll save.

Google rose to fame and fortune because it was fantastically useful. Now it’s morphed into an entity that wants to invade everything and, in the process, become a right pain in the arse.