• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 7, 2023

Google will begin to use SynthID watermarks for all creative assets generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in Performance Max and Google Ads, as the company continues to build out features and tools that automate processes.

The company announced Tuesday it will use the invisible watermark for images, and include open standard metadata to identify that AI generated the image, as it prepared to roll out asset generation in Google Performance Max in beta to all advertisers by the end of the year. 

Guardrails put in place will prevent systems from engaging with inappropriate and sensitive prompts or policy-violating creatives. Any ad created with AI-generated assets will need to follow Google’s existing Ads policies before it serves up across Google's publisher network. 

Google AI will create and generate text and image assets from prompts, but advertisers are in complete control and can edit, remove and curated assets they do not approve.

Marketers will enter a URL, and Google AI will crawl it to find the relevant information about the company’s business in order to build the assets. Google AI learns what makes the brand unique, pulling in details such as product descriptions and logos. The campaign is populated with text, images and other assets relevant to the campaign, and the assets are created in seconds.

“Performance Max does require a new way of thinking,” said Brendon Kraham, vice president of search and commerce for Google Ads Solutions. “It orients and optimizes around an advertiser’s goal, which is different than a manual campaign.”

While the creative process begins with the advertiser's URL and other information from a business’s website to generate the assets, Performance Max also will take performance data into consideration when suggesting or generating assets for campaigns to help ads perform better. 

For retailers with product assets, product imagery in Merchant Center is used in the linked Performance Max campaigns. As a result, marketers can use Product Studio in Merchant Center Next to edit product images with AI and then run them in a campaign. 

1-800-flowers.com was an early adopter of the feature. “This innovative approach not only saves us valuable time but also enables us to craft high-quality, personalized visuals that resonate with our audience,” Jason John, CMO at 1-800-flowers.com, told Google. “With generated assets, we can experiment, adapt and tell compelling stories.”

New image and editing capabilities in 2024 will give brands and agencies the ability to generate new headlines, descriptions and images to quickly try new creative concepts, along with existing ones. Image editing will allow marketers to try variations of existing and generated images. 

For businesses with fewer creative resources the tool aims to support creation in a few prompts and generate high-quality assets in seconds to build out your campaign’s assets from scratch. These assets can act as the foundation of your creative concepts, while image editing lets you easily try new variations to maximize your impact and learnings. Also coming next year, the ability to share assets once created.