WPP partners with Google Cloud to power-up generative-AI driven marketing

WPP and Google Cloud are forging a new collaboration which will allow marketers to use generative-AI (gen-AI) to do things they could only “dream of”.

The partnership, which was announced in Las Vegas, US, earlier today at Google’s Cloud Next ‘24 conference, will see the tech giant’s Gemini models be integrated into WPP Open—the agency’s AI-powered marketing operating system.

WPP Open is currently used by more than 35,000 people and adopted by brands including The Coca-Cola Company, L’Oréal and Nestlé.

By combining Google’s expertise in data analytics, generative-AI and cyber security, WPP’s end-to-end marketing capabilities and global creative scale, this collaboration could redefine marketing efficiency and effectiveness.

WPP will use Google Cloud’s advanced gen-AI tools with its marketing and advertising data to help clients create brand and product-specific content, predict and explain content effectiveness, as well as gaining deeper insights into their target audiences and optimising and adapting campaigns.

The first phase of the partnership, which comes as part of WPP’s annual invest of £250 (US$ 316) million in AI, data and technology, will focus on four key use cases:

• Smarter content optimisation: By integrating Gemini, WPP has upgraded its AI Performance Brain, which has made the way it predicts the success of marketing content, faster and more accurate, even ahead of campaign activation and offers explanations. This has the potential to free up millions of dollars for brands to re-invest.
   
• Enhanced creativity with WPP Open Creative Studio: Gemini 1.5 Pro’s large context window, which allows it to run one million tokens of information, means that more brand content and guidelines can be used for prompts, such as colour palettes, fonts, voice, and even previous marketing campaigns. This could enable the development of much richer and dynamic user interfaces, and more creative and on-brand content can be developed.
   
• AI narration: WPP will use Gemini to automatically generate customisable narration scripts that will speed up the video creation process, make it more efficient and offer brands a personalised touch.
   
• Hyper-realistic product representation: Using Gemini and Universal Scene Description 3D file formats to understand a brand’s style guidelines, WPP’ will be able to produce detailed 3D, brand-compliant product images for marketing and advertising.

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.”

Watch a presentation from WPP on its ‘AI Performance Brain’ from last year.

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