“They Talked a Lot and Said Nothing.”

Google’s annual event for advertisers was full of AI buzzwords, but lacking in anything beyond the expected obsession over AI and some incremental updates to existing marketing products.

Our Coverage:

Google’s Big Day Out

Watch Our Pre-Show

Ads in AI Summaries

Smarter Search Results

Brand Profiles

Images in Ad Campaigns

Shopping Ads

Reporting

Expert Analysis

Google’s Big Day Out

Today should have been one of Google’s best days of the year.

Every year, Google’s Marketing Live event showcases what they’re working on in the year ahead for advertisers, new ad products, changes to existing tools, and so on.

But the last couple of years of Google Marketing Lives have been pretty disappointing — unless you’re a fan of buzzwords.

And this year’s was no exception.

Watch Our Pre-Show

Earlier today, our Google ads correspondent Jyll Saskin Gales and I co-hosted our own pre-announcement event, along with former Google ad executives Mathew Growden and Solange Abraham. We talked about what the last year has been like and what the year ahead will likely have in store for marketers.

Watch that pre-show here:
(recorded one hour before the GML event):

You can also watch the official event or read Google’s wrap-up of the announcements.

Okay, on with our coverage of the announcements:

Ads in AI Summaries

First — and we knew this was coming — ads will soon be inside those AI summary blocks at the top of Google search results.

Their example was a search for “how do I get wrinkles out of clothes?” At the top of the results was, of course, the AI generated summary, then a new “Sponsored” section with a shopping carousel showing wrinkle spray available for sale by advertisers.

Google claims it’ll only show the ads when they’re relevant, though of course with these things relevancy is in the eye of the beholder.

And with much of today’s hypefest, the particulars were lacking.

Smarter Search Results

One interesting addition was that they’re working on a way for ads to take in information beyond the search query, to personalize the ad in a way we haven’t seen before.

The example they used was someone searching for “extra space storage,” then when the user tapped on a sponsored listing of a storage company, Google asks them to upload some photos of their belongings, and it would then recommend a specific storage product from that advertiser.

Yet to be determined: How comfortable users will be sharing even more information in order to get a perhaps more relevant ad.

Google says they’ll start testing this with a small group of advertisers in the U.S. over the coming weeks.

Brand Profiles

Google also announced new brand profiles are coming. They’ll be a sort of home page made on the fly from information in your Google Merchant Center profile. These are similar to the Google Business Profiles also found in search results. It’s not clear why there are now two different types of profiles for businesses.

Images in Ad Campaigns

They’re making the image generation tools understand industries, but didn’t provide a lot of detail on why that would help, other than this will generate “high-quality, performant assets.” (See what I mean about the buzzwords?) This industry-aware generation still some months away.

One thing that was a nice touch: You’ll soon be able to provide the AI with your official colors and font, to force the images it makes for you to be more brand compliant. If, of course, it honors your selections.

In the coming weeks, you'll be able to edit images—including product images from your Google Merchant Center feed—across Performance Max and other campaign types.

They’re also adding tools to add and remove objects, extend backgrounds, and adjust images to fit any size, orientation, and aspect ratio. The example they showed looks very similar to Photoshops’s AI, where you lasso and area, then give it a text prompt like “Add some flowers here.”

Shopping Ads

Some new bells and whistles coming for Shopping Ads — 3D rotation ads and virtual try-ons.

Google also says soon advertisers will be able to include product videos, summaries and similar product recommendations within the ad itself. This is something we saw from time to time in organic results, but now it’s coming to ads.

Reporting

A few nice touches for the data nerds:

Google will soon start surfacing YouTube videos in placement reports so you know where your PMax ads are showing on that platform — and offer exclusions in case you want to block certain channels. This is also something they announced a while back.

As was asset-level reporting, apparently still coming to Performance Max in the coming months so you’ll be able to review metrics for each creative asset. This may not be flashy, but is actually a pretty big deal for marketers who still like to get into the weeds of their campaigns reports.

And they say they’re introducing a new diagnostics experience for Performance Max, Demand Gen, Search, Video, and Display campaigns.

“This will unify insights across areas like bidding, assets, conversion setup, and billing into a single view, with the option to drill in for more details. Diagnostic insights are also expanding to your campaign-level Overview. Critical issues will be immediately flagged at the top of the page, so you can easily check whether your campaign is working as intended.”
— Google

Expert Analysis

There were tons more little announcements — Demand Gen, animated image ads, lower minimums for lookalikes, and a bunch more.

Maybe I’m jaded.. I was expecting a little more. At least one big meaty thing to get excited about.

Our Google ads correspondent Jyll Saskin Gales joined me after the event.

Here’s her take on the announcements, in under 3 minutes:

There was other news of course today, and we’ll have all that tomorrow.

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