Jaideep Jhangiani is Google’s Director of Ads Marketing for Southeast Asia.
AI as a technology is advancing faster than the internet did. For marketers, that’s resulting in new tools that are speeding up the process of learning about our customers’ needs, ideating and creating winning campaigns, and expanding our impact.
In APAC, especially, we’ve reached the point of “adopt or get left behind” — 85% of marketers say they are in the planning or designing phase for AI implementation.1
There is no doubt that AI can be a really strong partner to advertisers in domains where there’s ample existing data. But the output of an AI model is only as good as the input it gets. Feed it with poor data and it will give poor results.
That’s why it can never replace your creativity, your strategic insights, and your expertise. These will always be to your advantage, and when they all come together, you can unleash the full potential of AI as a powerful technology differentiator. It brings what’s been out of reach, within reach and opens up new opportunities to transform your business.
But the reality is that AI has been around for a while. So why all the buzz about it now?
To understand why AI is on everyone’s minds, lips, and fingertips, and to fully appreciate how this moment is transformative, let’s go back to 1997. That’s when Deep Blue became the first computer algorithm to beat a reigning world chess champion.
Game-changing AI advancements
Deep Blue was an early form of predictive AI, which looks at past patterns to predict options with the best future outcomes. It was trained to solve specific and numerically complex problems, like chess.
Since then, Google has been powering the products you use and love with predictive AI, bringing continuous, steady improvements to the way we live and work through innovations such as traffic prediction in Google Maps, and in Ads, with smart bidding.
While many are familiar with applications powered with predictive AI, most of the recent transformation is in the field of generative AI. Unlike predictive AI models, which reason towards a specific outcome, generative AI models reason across a wide range of topics and areas, from poetry to maths problems, medical diagnoses and marketing. They can also produce new content.
Because generative AI is much more complex than predictive AI, its models need to be much larger in size. In 2017, models in this domain had fewer than 100 million parameters but later that year, things changed dramatically when Google released the “Transformer” architecture, which is the “T” when you hear “GPT.”
That led to rapid advancements in AI model design, and model sizes have grown 18,000X in the last five years alone, most recently hitting 1.8 trillion parameters in 2023. To put this into context, large language model sizes grew at 4X the pace of internet speeds in one-fifth the time. It’s this acceleration that has kicked off breakthroughs around AI.
Two developments in generative AI are changing the game:
Beyond size, generative AI is advancing in other ways. For one thing, they’re becoming multimodal.
The Gemini model, for instance, is built from the ground up to be multimodal, which means that it can seamlessly understand and operate across different types of information, including images, video, audio, code, and text.
Also, generative AI has had an exponential growth in context windows — the amount of information a model can take in and process in a given prompt.
For example, the context window of Gemini 1.5 Pro doubled to 2 million tokens between February and May this year. What this means is that it can now take in and process content that is equivalent to a 5,000 page book, two hours of video, 22 hours of audio, or 60,000 lines of code, and conduct almost immediate reasoning to a high degree of sophistication and accuracy.
The transformative power of AI
And now, you can now tap into the capabilities of AI as a marketer and use them across your campaigns to learn, ideate, create, and expand the potential of marketing campaigns.
Learn
Early-stage research for a campaign, such as estimating a new market’s potential or segment size, can be time-consuming. But Gemini can help you get estimates within minutes. And its recently-launched feature, Gems, lets you create your personal AI experts on any topic with a few clicks.
Say you’re a coffee brand looking to reach Gen Z coffee lovers in Indonesia with a campaign. You can start by creating a custom Gem that acts as your personal market research assistant. With one prompt, you can get it to analyse the market size of Gen Zs in cities in Indonesia. You can even train the Gem with your previous research to get more relevant responses.
Ideate
To move from learning to brainstorming, you can use Gemini’s idea generation feature to jumpstart your creative process. Take the example of the coffee brand's campaign. You can get inspiration by asking Gemini to provide four to five ideas for a 30-second video campaign to reach Gen Z coffee drinkers.
Remember: The more specific your prompt, the better the ideas you’ll get. And you can go further with the ideas you like by prompting Gemini to “share more thoughts” or “elaborate.”
Create
Once you’ve identified a great idea, kickstart creative production with Imagen 3, our latest and most advanced text-to-image AI model. It can help you create a wide variety of high-quality images based on your prompt, within seconds.
Going back to the example of the campaign for a coffee brand, you can prompt Imagen 3 to create the specific image you want for your campaign.
If you’re looking to create videos for a campaign, you’ll be able to do this with Veo. It’s our latest and most advanced video generation model that can create high-definition video content from nuanced text prompts.
Expand
To grow the impact of your engaging creatives and compelling campaigns, deliver them to your audience at the right times to meet their specific needs.
For that, you’ll need to choose the right ad impressions to buy and make decisions across a multitude of options in a matter of seconds, which is where AI comes in as a game changer.
AI-powered ad campaigns have been enhancing marketing performance for many years and they’ve become increasingly sophisticated, addressing marketing objectives across the entire funnel.
On YouTube, for instance, AI-powered video campaigns make it possible for you to build connections with engaged viewers across in-stream, in-feed, and Shorts, and for a variety of marketing objectives. To raise awareness, use Video reach campaigns, and to drive brand consideration use Video view campaigns. You can also tap into Demand Gen to create demand across Google’s immersive surfaces, including YouTube, Discover, and Gmail.
Further down the marketing funnel, you can tap into Performance Max to expand your campaign coverage on Search and across Google’s full range of channels. Besides helping you reach customers wherever they are, AI-powered ad campaigns also let you optimise your campaign towards business goals such as maximising profit.
Indeed, as marketers, we’ve long embraced the intersection of technology and creativity because it leads to extraordinary things, and we know great creatives mean great business. With the AI age upon us, it’s time to take hold of this game-changing moment and unlock opportunities for marketing to transform business.
