Vidhya Srinivasan, VP and general manager, ads at Google spoke at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on 19 June about AI and creativity. You can read an edited excerpt from her remarks below, which originally appeared in the Google Ads & Commerce Blog.
When we apply AI for our billions of users, creators, and businesses, the impact is exponential. AI in Search is helping people find answers to more specific and complex questions. It’s also powering new ways to explore and create on YouTube, where people are looking for possibilities, discovery, and inspiration.
As we see AI evolve digital experiences, the role of advertising to connect people and businesses is as critical as ever. We help people find what they want in this vast world of information. And, as they explore, relevant and resonant creative is still what makes the difference for advertisers.
We believe generative AI will unlock enormous potential. Scale, speed, and customisation will reach new levels. Faster creative production, tailored media activation, and real-time measurement will all work together to drive performance. That’s our multiyear vision, but there’s so much this technology is doing for advertisers already.
You can use AI to generate insights about your audiences to better understand their behaviours and come up with new strategies to engage them.
You can shorten and scale creative production to bring ideas to life faster. Take Veo, our latest and most advanced video generation model, which creates high-definition content from nuanced creative prompts. You can even ask for specific cinematic techniques and visual effects. It created this lion just for Cannes.
And, with a new universe of assets, you can scale your campaigns to connect with more consumers faster than ever before. In a recent Pixel 8 campaign, Google Marketing used Demand Gen to generate 4,500 different ad variations that ran across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail.
I think about AI like cameras on our phones. While some of us still play with film, the average picture or video is much better because of technology. That doesn’t mean we can all shoot magazine covers. No matter how much AI improves, it doesn’t have taste or ingenuity. But AI can open up new ways to expand your potential.
If last year was about “what is AI?”, this year is all about “how can I use AI?” In the past 12 months, search interest for “how to use AI” has increased 5.5X in the U.S. and 4.5X in the EU.1 That’s a smart question to ask. As AI technologies improve and come into wider use, your creativity, your strategic thinking, and your ability to use these tools will be the difference maker.
It’s an exciting time to be a creative experimenting with AI. New models like Gemini are multimodal, which means they can reason across text, code, images, audio, and video.
On stage, Google Creative Lab Director Alex Chen showed how simply playing with AI can generate an infinite universe of ideas and shared some examples of how Google creatives are leading the way.
In our latest Best Phones Forever campaign, which launched at Cannes this week, our writers used AI to enhance their storytelling, generating drafts and responses to comments in real time, as users suggested where our phone friends should go next on their “AI Road Trip.”
Google creatives worked with illustrators to reimagine what they can do with AI through our Infinite Wonderland project. They used Google’s Imagen 2 to turn the classic children’s book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” into an endless universe of illustrations. Try it out for yourself.
Chen also showed how teams can generate new alphabets made out of anything, including layered gelatin, ramen noodles, and pool floaties with the GenType tool.
Through these use cases, Chen showed that you don’t need any special expertise to start playing with AI. Right now is a perfect time for anyone to dive in and start exploring their own ideas. Human curiosity is only limited by the tools we have to explore. And, with AI as a tool, the potential for creatives and creativity is limitless.
As with any new tech, it’ll take time to figure out how to make AI helpful for everyone. In many cases, we will need to experiment and learn to get to the right answers together, but there are tools ready for you to play with now.
When we build AI responsibly by design, it is a powerful enabler that expands your potential. AI will help you explore ideas fast and help you scale them, enhancing creativity and performance together. For marketing, this means moving from one key visual to a universe of brand and creative assets — all created by you, with help from AI.
