by Tod Maffin and Steph Gunn
Google Expands AI Tools for Marketers
Enhanced Insights for Performance Max
Generative AI Coming To Shorts
Olympics Ad Performance: Worth the Hype?
LinkedIn Updates Its Terms ‘Shortly’—After Using Y …
Google Expands AI Tools for Marketers
Google Ads has some new updates for marketers…
Expanding AI-driven search ads
They’re expanding the ‘conversational experience' for search campaigns. This feature generates headlines, images, and other content for search campaigns.
It’s now available in more languages, including:
German
French
Spanish
New AI tools
The tech giant is also expanding AI-powered image editing to new campaign types beyond Performance Max.
Now, advertisers can enhance image assets in:
Plus, asset generation is being expanded to six new languages.
Marketers can also provide up to five reference images along with a prompt for AI to generate brand-consistent visuals for Performance Max campaigns.
Enhanced Insights for Performance Max
Google is also launching a new impression-reporting tool that gives advertisers more insight into the performance of search campaigns run through Performance Max, the company's AI-powered ad-buying platform.
The new tool shows the performance of text and Shopping ads on search results pages.
Performance Max will also feature campaign-level negative keywords, letting marketers exclude specific queries from search ads, by the end of the year.
Advertisers will also receive recommendations to improve underperforming ads, such as adding more images or text.
These features are being rolled out for Performance Max campaigns in several languages, including:
German
French
Spanish
Generative AI Coming To Shorts
The robot overlords at Google aren’t stopping at your search ads—they’re also taking over YouTube Shorts, and it could change how your brand creates content.
Veo joins the party
Google announced today that it plans to integrate DeepMind’s AI video generation model, Veo, into YouTube Shorts, letting users create AI video clips in the YouTube app, and directly post them to Shorts.
Veo was unveiled earlier this year, competing with technologies like OpenAI's Sora. The tool can produce 1080p video clips in a range of cinematic styles, offering a significant upgrade over YouTube’s existing ‘Dream Screen’ feature, which launched last year and lets creators generate backgrounds in Shorts from text prompts.
How it works
With Veo, creators will be able to generate six-second standalone video clips for Shorts.
By selecting “Create” and entering a prompt, Dream Screen will generate four images.
Creators then choose one to turn into a video.
This new option could help brands add dynamic filler scenes, like a New York City skyline, to enhance storytelling and create smoother video transitions. Veo can also edit and remix previously recorded footage.
The company plans to integrate Veo into Dream Screen later this year. Creations on Shorts will be watermarked using SynthID technology to label them as AI-generated.
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Olympics Ad Performance: Worth the Hype?
It's an ad buy that comes once every four years… The Paris Summer Olympics are now in the rearview mirror, but did the event deliver on advertising promises?
Record-breaking numbers
Digiday reports today that the 2024 Olympics saw impressive viewership numbers, with NBCU reporting:
An average of 30.5 million daily viewers
A record-breaking $1.2 billion in ad revenue
This was a 60% increase in sales over previous Games, surpassing the combined ad revenue of Tokyo and Rio.
Rising tide floated all broadcasters
Warner Bros. Discovery also had a major win, reaching 215 million people across Europe and delivering seven billion streaming minutes across Max and discovery+ — six times more than Tokyo 2020.
Channel 4, the British broadcaster and streamer, that delivers Paralympic coverage in the U.K., saw a boost in brand sponsorships, selling sixteen packages compared to seven in the Tokyo games. The broadcaster declined to share pricing or sales figures, however, a spokesperson for the company said sales were higher than Tokyo.
Peacock, NBCU’s premium streaming service, was a standout media highlight of the Games. For the first time, advertisers could run ads programmatically on Olympic coverage. Viewers watched 23.5 billion minutes on the platform, up 40% from all previous Summer and Winter Olympics combined. The company noted that digital revenues hit new highs, tripling what was seen at Tokyo, but didn’t get into specifics.
Amazon Prime Adds PayPal
Amazon’s Buy with Prime program, which lets Prime members buy from third-party stores and check out using their Amazon account, is now adding a new payment option: PayPal.
Prime + Paypal
Amazon announced that starting today, Prime customers can use PayPal to check out on sites integrated with the Buy with Prime API.
Next year, Prime members will be able to link their Amazon account to PayPal, letting Prime benefits automatically apply when using PayPal for purchases.
More updates
The e-commerce giant revealed several other updates to Buy with Prime today, including:
Real-time delivery estimates in TikTok ads for Buy with Prime merchants
The option to buy items with or without Prime in one checkout on Shopify stores
Snap’s New Code-Free AR
If you have wanted to try out augmented reality for your brand, but don't have a coding pro, Snap announced a new AI tool yesterday that lets you create lenses based on text queries.
How it works
The tool, called ‘Easy Lens,' lets you generate custom lenses simply by typing text descriptions.
Snap is also rolling out Body Morph, a generative AI tool that creates content from a text caption or reference image, including:
3D characters
Costumes
Outfits
Lens Studio will also soon include an image generator specifically for creating Lens icons.
More updates
Looking ahead, Snap says, it will add even more generative capabilities to Lens Studio, including:
A custom animation generator
A tool for reconstructing 3D objects from video uploads
LinkedIn Updates Its Terms ‘Shortly’—After Using Your Data
The professional network is now training its AI with your data.
Today, several users noticed a new setting letting LinkedIn use their content to improve its generative AI, even though the terms of service hadn’t been updated yet.
When questioned, LinkedIn promised to update its terms “shortly.”
The new option, found under “Data for Generative AI Improvement,” is also turned on by default.
LinkedIn has since updated its user agreement and privacy policy—better late than never?
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