Google recently launched a suite of new creative updates and AI-powered creative tools yesterday that will enable advertisers to create better varieties of effective images to drive performance in their campaigns.

According to Pallavi Naresh, Google’s Group Product Manager, these new capabilities are aimed at assisting advertisers to create stronger connections with target audience in ads and craft compelling campaigns that yield better business outcomes.

For example, if you’re an instructor who wants to drive leads for cooking class enrollments, you could use a simple prompt like “person cooking” or be more specific with “middle-aged man chopping carrots.” If the initial images you get don’t meet your expectations, you can generate more variations or add more descriptive details to the prompt like age, gender, race, ethnicity and nationality to customize further. 

Here is a summary of the updates:

1. More engaging lifestyle images: With the help of Imagen 3, Google has rolled out the ability to use text prompts to generate images that contain adult people and faces across Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display and Apps campaigns. 
2. Improved asset mix: To help scale and improve the variety of visual assets, a new feature, asset-audience recommendations will give advertisers new ideas to improve the effectiveness of their images by showing the themes and elements that resonate with their top audiences like “nature” and “ocean” scenes. 
3. More asset testing capabilities: Google has also introduced a beta feature for retailers who have campaigns with product feeds, but haven’t uploaded additional creative assets. This will allow them to compare the impact of adding text, image and video assets to their campaigns in PMax.

Richer, more engaging lifestyle images

Since it first announced asset generation in Performance Max, Google has continued to improve the technology so that it can generate high-quality assets that resonate with customers and deliver better results.

Last year, the tech giant expanded the asset generation feature to six new languages, introduced it to new campaign types, including Demand Gen and upgraded its image generation model. 

With the help of Imagen 3, Google ads now can use text prompts to generate images that contain adult people and faces across Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display and Apps campaigns.

The company said that it conducted extensive user research and developed protocols and safeguards to meet advertisers’ high expectations for quality while adhering to rigorous product and design principles and clear ad policies.

In addition, users won’t be able to generate images of brand-named products, prominent figures like politicians and celebrities, children or minors, or other sensitive or explicit content. Also, all generated images are tagged- using SynthID– to provide transparency into which images were generated using AI. 

IAnd, if users don’t like the images generated, they can “Hide” them and provide feedback to help Google improve its AI capabilities.

“We can easily generate images tailored to specific audiences within the campaign creation process. The potential to significantly shorten the production cycles of creatives is no longer a fancy futuristic theory. It’s already here. Today.” – Matthias Wenninger, Group Head Performance Marketing Manager, Mediaplus Performance Germany said about the new features.

New asset testing capabilities

Pallavi explained that Google has continued to invest in experiments for Performance Max that help users test the impact of different changes and optimizations.

The tech giant is introducing a beta for retailers who have campaigns with product feeds but haven’t uploaded additional creative assets.

With it, they can compare the impact of adding text, image and video assets to campaigns (including assets built with generative AI) against control configurations with no assets.

If you’re interested in this beta, you can contact your Google account team to sign up.

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