Google will use artificial intelligence to create the advertising campaigns

Google may soon be incorporating generative AI into its advertising business. Yet another clue as to how Big Tech is racing to incorporate the phenomenon of the moment into its services arsenal.

To give the news of the plan is the Financial Times, which cites an internal submission reserved for search engine advertisers. Alphabet would like to use AI to create advertisements, based on material first created by “human” marketers. It is no coincidence that the presentation is called very directly: “AI-powered ads 2023”.

Google moves from a basic assumption: “Generative AI is unleashing a world of creativity”, reads the presentation. Not without counterpoints and problems, linked for example to the protection of the creative work itself.

Not that thinking machines are today outside the Google system, which uses AI to make purchase suggestions for certain products to its users. What the document promisesor seen from ft however, it is a leap in quality: he wants to use his latest version of generative AI in advertising services, the same one that also feeds the Bard chatbot. The alternative to ChatGpt and Bing unveiled by Google last February was not all rosy, for example when it stumbled upon an incorrect answer on the very day of its presentation causing a disastrous crash in the Alphabet stock market. Perfected for advertising use, it should be able to produce much more sophisticated campaigns. That is, to replace a marketing agency.

Not entirely. The advanced mechanism in the presentation still requires the creatives to provide the contents such as images, videos and text. The campaign will then be made by artificial intelligence, which will make the best use – according to its algorithm – of the material to more effectively target the audience it is instructed to reach, or other objectives such as a certain level of sales. There is no shortage of doubts, expressed by the same sources of the City newspaper, about the fact that this mixing could lead to the dissemination of false information, but Google itself has reassured that before going online with its new services, solid corrective operations will be implemented to avoid “hallucinations” of the AI.

So the race between Big G and Microsoft-ChatGPT rises in tone. Google should incorporate the updates – which have already affected some features of tools such as Workspace, Docs and Gmail – in Performance Max, the system which, thanks to algorithms, suggests the optimal placement of advertisements, but also manages to indicate the budget allocation. We also cling to these new features to try to reverse the difficult trend of the advertising industry – finally remember the ft – also determined by the uncertain economic situation which leads to cutting the dedicated plans. In addition to the increasingly stringent presence of rules and controls on the use of personal data, as demonstrated by the initiative of the Privacy Guarantor in Italy. Meta, the Facebook company, is also following a similar path.