Dive Brief:

• WPP and Google announced a new collaboration model at the Cloud Next ‘24 conference in Las Vegas. Under this model, the holding company will integrate Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro generative AI tool into its marketing operating system, WPP Open.
• Google Cloud’s gen AI tools will be combined with WPP’s proprietary marketing and advertising data to enable clients to create brand- and product-specific content, gain deeper insights into target audiences, predict content effectiveness and optimize campaigns.
• The partnership is part of WPP’s previously announced ongoing annual investment of more than 250 pounds (about $318 million) in AI data and technology and provides a boost to Google’s Gemini generative AI platform, which has been met with some controversy since its debut earlier this year.

Dive Insight:

While there has been no shortage of deals between holding companies and the larger players creating generative AI tools — Dentsu and AWS and IPG with Adobe, for instance — the sheer size of these two partners, along with the scope of their collaboration signals that this could be a tipping point for generative AI within agencies.

More than 35,000 of WPP’s people are using WPP Open, as are many of its key clients, including The Coca-Cola Company, L’Oreal and Nestle, the agency holding company noted in its announcement. The collaboration with Google Cloud’s Gemini Pro will only increase and enhance that usage, according to WPP executives.

WPP’s Chief Technology Officer Stephan Pretorius said in a statement that the partnership “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 optimization. I believe this will be a game-changer for our clients and the marketing industry at large.”

The collaborative partnership will initially focus on four areas:

• Enhancing creativity, through the integration of Gemini 1.5 Pro into WPP’s Creative Studio gen AI app to help with tasks such as writing headlines and turning sketches into images. Gemini’s large context window allows more content guidelines and prompts, including brand-specific color palettes, fonts, voice and past marketing campaigns.
• Smarter content optimization by using Gemini 1.5 Pro to improve WPP’s proprietary Performance Brain predictive content performance engine, ahead of campaign activation. The integration promises to make predictions faster, more accurate and enable reasoning behind predictions for better content improvement recommendations.
• Real-time development of narration and description for video to create customized scripts that can be sent to WPP partner ElevenLabs to generate a realistic voice for production, thereby making video creation faster and more efficient.
• Hyper-realistic product representation using gen AI and Universal Scene Description 3D file formats to incorporate both a brand’s style guidelines and the product’s shape, design and packaging in a brand-compliant image for marketing purposes.

The partnership could also bring a boost to Google’s Gemini AI platform, which has been wrapped in the same controversies that other generative AI tools have experienced based on instances of misinformation and inaccurate content.