Google has announced a new generation of ads that are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), promising to revolutionize the advertising landscape and help advertisers reach more customers, improve ad performance, and streamline operations. This is the official confirmation following reports last week detailing Google's plans.
According to Google, AI-powered ads use machine learning technology to analyze user behavior and search patterns to determine the most relevant and effective ads to display. The AI algorithms use historical data to identify which ads perform best in different scenarios and optimize ad delivery accordingly.
AI-powered ads also automatically generate creative assets, eliminating the need for advertisers to manually design and upload multiple versions of ad copy and images. Instead, advertisers can provide a few inputs, such as headlines, descriptions, logos, and images, and let Google's AI create dynamic and engaging ads that match the user's intent and context.
Google claims that AI-powered ads can help advertisers achieve various goals, such as driving profitable growth, capturing reliable ROI, enabling relevance and personalization at scale, and multiplying customer connections and expertise. The company points to three areas whereby AI will empower its advertising capabilities:
- Personalized ads: Google will use AI to personalize ads to each user, based on their interests and browsing history. This means that users will see ads that are more relevant to them, and they are more likely to click on them.
- Contextual ads: Google will also use AI to place ads in the context of the content that users are viewing. This means that ads will be more relevant to the content that users are interested in, and they are less likely to be seen as intrusive.
- Intelligent bidding: Google will use AI to help advertisers bid more effectively on ads. This means that advertisers will get more value for their ad spend, and they are more likely to see a return on investment.
Google's move to introduce AI-powered ads is seen as a bold step to maintain its dominance in the online advertising market, which is increasingly challenged by competitors such as Facebook, Amazon, and TikTok.
However, some critics have expressed concerns over how AI-powered ads might affect user privacy, data security, and ad quality. Some users have also complained that ads are already too intrusive and pushy in Google's current search experience.
Google has assured that it will adhere to its privacy policies and principles when using AI-powered ads, and that it will give users control over their ad settings and preferences. Google has also said that it will monitor the quality and performance of AI-powered ads and provide feedback and guidance to advertisers on how to improve their campaigns.
Generative AI is Informing all Areas of Tech
Generative AI is a type of AI system that can generate new content, such as text, images, audio, or video, based on data or prompts. These systems learn from the input data and synthesize new content that resembles the training data but with some variation. Some instances of generative AI tools are ChatGPT from OpenAI, Bing Chat from Microsoft, and Bard from Google.
Google has been devoting considerable resources to generative AI research and development, especially in the domain of natural language processing (NLP). Google's LaMDA is a foundation model that can generate natural and coherent conversations on any topic.
Google has recently revealed its latest large language model (LLM), PaLM 2, which has remarkable capabilities in advanced reasoning, multilingual translation, and code generation. PaLM 2 is the enhanced version of PaLM, which was already a state-of-the-art LLM that could perform a variety of natural language tasks.
It is likely Microsoft will also explore using its AI tools to influence advertising on the Bing Ads platform, which became Microsoft Ads in 2019. In March, Microsoft said that its Bing Chat AI search tool will become ad supported. n an official blog post, Microsoft says with Bing Chat it wants to “drive more traffic to publishers in this new world of search”.
