Google Tells Advertisers AI Can Make Campaigns For Them

Google wants its ChatGPT rival to be an AI Don Draper.

According to a presentation for advertisers viewed by the Financial Times, Google is pitching AI-generated ad campaigns. Whether advertisers will put their faith in it remains to be seen. Obviously, Google does not and never will possess Draper’s flair for mixing an Old Fashioned, because who does?

If You Don’t Like What’s Being Said, Change The Prompts

Google was beaten to the punch by Microsoft-backed OpenAI when it debuted ChatGPT to the public, and then Google rushed its own Bard product to market in a halting bid to keep its search engine down with the kids. But now it’s trying to bounce back by applying Bard to its gigantic digital ad business. In the presentation viewed by the FT, Google tells advertisers they can plug in creative assets like ad copy and visuals into the machine and voilà: an ad campaign.

The big question is if advertisers will trust Bard to accurately represent their products. One source told the FT that they’re definitely worried:

• “It is optimized to convert new customers and has no idea what the truth is,” the source told the FT. Google told the paper it would put up strict guardrails to stop the tech from going seriously off-piste.
• A report from Bloomberg this week suggests Googlers themselves do not have a ton of faith in the product, both ethically and functionally. According to Bloomberg, ahead of Bard’s February public launch, one employee posted internally saying: “Bard is worse than useless: please do not launch.”

It’s hard enough deciding whether to put your faith in the hands of a chatbot, but what about a billionaire whose whole brand is unpredictability? Elon Musk attended a marketing conference this week in a bid to court advertisers back to Twitter. Musk said he wants to achieve “a sensible middle ground” between letting the twittersphere say what it wants and making it a place where advertisers don’t have to worry about their ads appearing next to… dicey content.

Battle Royale: Musk dangled the possibility of legal action against Microsoft after the company announced it’s removing Twitter from its advertising platform, meaning advertisers using its Smart Campaigns product won’t be able to tweet or otherwise move within the twittersphere. The exodus comes after Twitter changed its rules to force large enterprise customers like Microsoft to pay at least $42,000 per month.