WPP and Google Cloud collaboration a step-change in marketing efficiency and effectiveness

Image supplied. Formula-E's latest all-electric GEN-3 model generated in WPP Open using Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro

The announcement was made today, 9 April on the keynote stage at Google Cloud Next, in Las Vegas, US.

The move forms part of WPP’s ongoing annual investment of £250m in AI, data and technology, and its strategy to capitalise on its lead in the space by partnering with AI experts like Google.

"This collaboration marks a pivotal moment in marketing innovation,” says Stephan Pretorius, chief technology officer at WPP.

“Our integration of Gemini 1.5 Pro into WPP Open has significantly accelerated our gen AI innovation and enables us to do things we could only dream of a few months ago.

“With Gemini models, we're not only able to enhance traditional marketing tasks but also to integrate the end-to-end marketing process for continuous, adaptive optimisation. I believe this will be a game-changer for our clients and the marketing industry at large,” says Pretorius.

“AI has the potential to unlock new levels of effectiveness for marketers, whether it is optimising campaigns, automating repetitive tasks like brand descriptions, or sparking entirely new ideas,” says Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.

“This partnership brings the power of Google Cloud’s gen AI capabilities together with WPP’s deep marketing domain expertise to help our mutual customers create better campaigns that resonate with consumers in a deeper way,” adds Kurian.

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Driving a step-change in marketing efficiency and effectiveness

By combining Google's deep expertise in data analytics, generative AI (gen AI) technology and cyber security with WPP's end-to-end marketing capabilities, global creative scale and understanding of its clients’ brands, this partnership seeks to drive a step-change in marketing efficiency and effectiveness.

WPP Open is the network’s AI-powered marketing operating system that is already used by more than 35,000 of its people and adopted by key clients including The Coca-Cola Company, L’Oréal and Nestlé.

As part of the collaboration, Google Cloud's advanced-gen AI tools will be used with WPP's proprietary marketing and advertising data.

This will enable WPP’s clients to create brand- and product-specific content using gen AI, to gain deeper insights into their target audiences, to accurately predict and explain content effectiveness, and to optimise campaigns with ongoing adaptive processes.

Applying WPP’s decades of experience serving enterprise clients, WPP Open integrates with any client, partner or technology vendor to create optimised and automated marketing capabilities.

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Four innovative use cases to be developed

The inaugural phase of the partnership is focusing on the development of the following four innovative use cases:

Enhanced creativity with WPP Open Creative Studio

WPP has integrated Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro technology into Creative Studio, its gen AI app that is part of WPP Open and which helps with tasks such as writing headlines and turning a sketch into an image.

Gemini 1.5 Pro’s large context window, which allows it to run one million tokens of information consistently, means that more brand content and guidelines can be used for prompts, such as a brand’s colour palette, fonts, voice, and even past marketing campaigns. This enables the development of much richer and dynamic user interfaces, and by understanding the brand better, more creative and on-brand content can be developed.

Smarter content optimisation

WPP has upgraded its AI Performance Brain – a service that uses AI to predict how well marketing content will perform – by integrating Gemini 1.5 Pro to improve the way the system predicts the success of marketing content, even ahead of campaign activation.

This upgrade makes predictions faster and far more accurate, and enables reasoning behind the predictions, which offers superior recommendations to improve content. This tool has the potential to free up millions of dollars for brands to re-invest in only the best performing campaigns.

AI narration

WPP is taking video description solutions to the next level by pioneering real-time streaming capabilities for both description and narration. The system uses Gemini 1.5 Pro to automatically create customisable video narration scripts. These scripts are then sent to ElevenLabs, a WPP partner, which generates a realistic voice for the narration. This process makes video creation faster, more efficient, and allows for a personalised touch.

Hyper-realistic product representation

WPP is redefining product representation using gen AI to create better product images. This system uses Gemini 1.5 Pro and Universal Scene Description 3D file formats to not only understand a brand's style guidelines (logos, fonts, colours, etc.), but to also incorporate an actual product's shape, design, and packaging. The result is a detailed 3D and brand-compliant product image that's perfect for marketing and advertising.