Google Introduces New AI Creation Tools for Marketers

Google is ahead of many of its competitors in the AI race, but also must keep pace with other companies in terms of new product announcements, especially as it faces new threats to its dominance in search from Microsoft and OpenAI.

“A lot of their stuff has existed behind the scenes,” said Aaron Levy, vp of paid search at performance marketing agency Tinuiti. “They’re being a little bit more forward with what they’re doing and that’s the catch up.”

Generative AI could be useful … if it works

The bells and whistles Google is offering could be useful for marketers to iterate and save time.

“If they can make more recommendations or create assets on my behalf, spectacular,” said Adam Lovallo, founder of digital marketing agency Thesis.

While a concern with AI-created content is that creative assets no longer become differentiated, marketers can avoid this by making sure their inputs are differentiated. And search ads from different brands have sounded similar to each other for years, without being less effective, Lovallo said.

“It’s normal for performance marketers particularly to be borrowing liberally, if not copying outright and doing it with an AI,” Lovallo said, noting performance marketers have been using generative AI tech for years.

The question is not so much whether Google’s new tools will be useful, but whether they’re truly effective and efficient. For example, Automatically Creative Assets, which creates assets drawn in part from existing copy and images on a brand’s website, has not always excelled, Levy said.

“We’ve done our best to avoid them,” he said, noting that the generative AI-boost the product is getting could improve the product. “They look super generic.”

And some of Google’s new products, which lean into the hype of generative AI, may not be as good as its bevy of existing technologies that exist to help marketers write keywords.

“For serious enterprise, high-scale advertisers for sure the ideal interface is not an interactive chatbot where you have to type enter a million times,” Lovallo said.