REUTERS

GOOGLE has introduced new assistive tools enhanced by generative artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the efficiency of digital marketing for businesses.

“Small businesses, agencies, and major brands are seeing the opportunity, the potential, of AI to be additive to their own skills as a creative partner,” Dan Taylor, vice-president for global ads at Google, said in a roundtable on Friday.

To cater to this demand, Google Ads has introduced AI-boosted solutions to their existing products amid rapidly changing landscape for marketers, Mr. Taylor said.

Ad spending in the Philippine digital advertising market is projected to reach $1.608 billion in 2023, according to Statista.

“Our goal is to help advertisers perform better,” said Brian Burdick, senior director for search ad automation at Google.

The new products include AI- and large language model-powered improvements to Automatically Created Assets (ACA), conversational experience in campaign constructions, and Google Product Studio.

With these, Google said advertisers can produce text assets and professional-grade creative images by simply entering landing pages from their website and uploading existing product or service images.

AI will then generate relevant and effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images, and other assets for ad campaigns that advertisers can review and edit before deploying.

Advertisers can also chat with Google AI using natural, conversational language for suggestions and better performance.

A text-to-image AI model in Google Product Studio can also be used to help create new lifestyle product images from basic product photos. This will allow advertisers to prompt the tool with a brief description of their desired background and image elements.

“We’re trying to make it as user-friendly as possible,” said Jeff Harrell, senior director for shopping at Google, on AI-generated image assets using Google Product Studio.

“There is no special knowledge needed of AI versus being able to be descriptive about what you’re looking for,” he added.

Text-based AI-generated assets with ACA are currently in global open beta testing stage for English, with plans to include more languages this year, the company said.

Conversational experience in Google Ads will start a closed beta testing in the United States soon, it added.

Google Product Studio will be available in the US later this year via Merchant Center Next or the Google and YouTube Channel App on Shopify.

“We are absolutely looking to expand over the course of the year,” Mr. Harrell said on growing access to different regions and languages.

Amid the current issues surrounding AI, Google said it is carefully integrating the use of the technology in its products.

“Even if a creative is generated [by AI] in a way that isn’t quite right for the use case, we have really high quality policies in place to make sure that we catch those ads before they’re served,” Mr. Taylor said.

“As these AI tools develop new ways to deliver creatives at scale, we’re also developing policies and monitoring of those creatives to make sure that they deliver a great experience for the consumer,” he added. — Miguel Hanz L. Antivola