Over the subsequent few days, Google Cloud will lay out its latest innovations in a future powered by artificial intelligence (AI) at the corporate’s Next ‘25 conference in Las Vegas. While largely focused on the technical side of the Google Cloud offering, several developments speak to how brands and agencies can use AI to power marketing and customer experience applications.
“Consumer expectations are consistently changing, and that is creating pressure, each for market share and margin dynamics within the [retail] industry,” said Carrie Tharp, vp for global solutions and industries at Google Cloud, in a press briefing upfront of the conference going down April September 11.
Along with what Tharp calls “crazy uncontrollables” just like the Trump administration’s recently announced tariff plan, marketers must grapple with customer journeys getting longer — the typical consumers has 10 touchpoints on their journey to purchase. Those journeys are also feeling more fraught: Two in three consumers delay or avoid purchase decisions once they have an excessive amount of information. AI could provide a way forward.
“If consumers believe within the brand and the product, they’re rather more likely to recommend that to their customers, so how are we going to apply AI to help this overall pressure dynamic?” the chief asked.
Eight weeks into eight hours
Google Cloud news this week includes that it can add Lyria, its text-to-music model, to Vertex AI, making the platform the just one to offer generative media models across video, image, speech and music. Lyria may also help create soundtracks for marketing campaigns, product launches or in-store experiences, in addition to enabling the creation of sonic branding, per the corporate. The ability to quickly create custom music tracks saves on time and the associated fee of looking for royalty-free music.
Brands are already using Vertex to increase efficiency throughout the marketing process. L’Oréal Groupe is using Vertex’s Veo tool for video generation and the Imagen tool for image generation to speed up the creation of high-quality assets, which is impacting how the corporate views creativity.
“These models act as powerful creative partners, empowering our teams to experiment with new ideas and respond to the market. We’re expanding our qualitative video and image production across 20 additional countries and languages, all while upholding to our trustworthy AI values,” said Thomas Ménard, manager of AI center enablement at L’Oréal Groupe, in an announcement.
Kraft Heinz can be using Veo and Imagen tools as a part of its Tastemaker platform, bringing speed and efficiency to creative workflows — doing work that after took eight weeks in just eight hours.
“Implementing Google Cloud AI inside our platform that’s deeply trained on our brand intelligence, allows innovation and inventive teams to rapidly prototype, test and deploy content, transforming how we bring our iconic brands to life,” said Justin Thomas, head of digital experience and growth at Kraft Heinz, said in an announcement.
Boosting creative ROI
Elsewhere, Google Cloud’s Creative Agents are getting used to boost creative teams in media production, marketing, promoting, design and beyond. WPP used agents as a part of its Open platform, while Monks.Flow is using Google AI to help localize campaign creative and the Brandtech Group built a generative AI platform, Pencil, to help brands create ads, predict performance and optimize campaigns.
Mondelez, which in 2024 launched a new AI platform supported by Accenture and Publicis Groupe, is looking to notch a 25% ROI using generative AI for content and inventive development at brands including Oreo and Cadbury.
“You are seeing many big platforms, retailers and brand, begin to dabble with what this looks like, and we now have many products for them to apply,” Google Cloud’s Tharp explained. “We have large consumer packaged goods firms with very high standards and types at the moment are able to use image generation and video generation to get to truly one-to-one marketing.”
Papa Johns announced last week a partnership with Google Cloud to use Google data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence chatbots in its ordering and delivery processes. The pizza chain can be expected to use AI to create marketing campaigns that may deliver personalized offers, content and timing based on preferences. The Papa Johns partnership speaks to how marketers and related professionals can use a number of Google Cloud tools in tandem.
“Whether you are a merchant, a store associate, a marketer or someone who works in analytics, we wish to be certain that we simplify the dynamic of all of those language models, the several agents… you can be interacting with and the entire generative tools, and put that power in your hand in your day-to-day processes,” Tharp said.
Read the total article here
