WPP announced today that it has integrated Google Earth AI into its marketing platform WPP Open.  

Google Earth AI is a set of geospatial AI models and tools that combine the tech giant’s global satellite imagery technology with AI platform Gemini’s reasoning capabilities to offer what it calls “real-world” intelligence.  

Earth AI was announced late last year, and the integration with WPP Open follows an expanded partnership around cloud and AI capabilities that the two companies struck last October.   

Noting that 80% of retail sales still happen offline, WPP said this latest integration of Google technology with WPP Open will help clients anticipate consumer needs and understand in real-time how the physical environment — traffic, weather, neighborhood foot traffic and more — are shaping consumer behavior and purchasing decisions.  

The additional intelligence will enable clients to refine and automate marketing at a hyper-local level, per the holding company.  

One example is the insurance sector, where clients could combine predictive weather modeling with WPP’s understanding of consumer behavior, allowing companies to communicate ahead of time to consumers to ensure they are prepared — possibly changing policies or acting to protect property and prevent claims from arising.    

The holding company also cited a recent media-planning case study where it worked with an auto client to develop an “Electric Vehicle Readiness Index” using Earth AI data to understand the availability of chargers.

The index helped hone in on the best Designated Market Areas for media buys achieving significantly higher performance at lower cost.   

The new integration will also drive new maps-based production workflows with the goal of developing much faster and more culturally contextual creative content down to the city level.   

 "Google Earth AI brings together a whole universe of datasets representing the physical world into a single foundation model that for the first time allows us to make decisions in an entirely new way,” stated Stephan Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer at WPP. “By integrating this foundational physical-world data with our marketing data, we are changing the way the marketing industry thinks about consumer journeys.”