Mark Read, WPP CEO, promised investors recently that the group would be getting serious about AI. It turns out that he was finalising a new partnership with Google, whose advanced AI tools will now be integrated into WPP’s own AI marketing system, called WPP Open.
The deal AI promises to optimise pretty much everything, from content and information processing to headlines and script writing – with some hyper-realistic product images thrown in (see below).
With the group’s creative agencies underperforming and the 0.9% growth in 2023 coming mostly courtesy of media, Read has been under pressure to pull something out of the bag. Especially when rivals Publicis and Omnicom are forecasting 5% growth for this year, while WPP is expecting to stick at 0.9%.
Stephan Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer at WPP, said: “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.”
