Google’s Gemini AI to help write and narrate ads for marketing behemoth WPP

WPP - the parent company of a number of the world’s best-known ad firms, such as  Ogilvy, Wunderman Thompson and VMLY&R - said the partnership with Google focuses on “four innovative use cases”.

Those are integration of Google’s “creative studio”, which allows for more brand content and guidelines to be used for prompts; improved content optimisation to predict how successful a campaign will be before it launches; use of AI to create “hyper-realistic” images of products; and AI narration, including scripts written by Gemini.

The narration system will use Gemini 1.5 Pro to create customisable video narration scripts, which are then sent to London startup Eleven Labs to generate a voice to narrate videos.

The Gemini tech will be integrated into WPP Open, WPP’s AI-powered marketing operating system, which is already used by a number of the world’s best-known firms, icluding Coca-Cola and Nestle.

WPP has been making a big pivot to AI in recent years, investing £250 million in the technology.

Stephan Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer at WPP, said: "This collaboration marks a pivotal moment in marketing innovation. 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.”

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said: “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. 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.”