Agency holding group WPP has signed a deal with Google Cloud which will see Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro generative AI model integrated into WPP Open, the agency’s ‘operating system’ used across the company. The deal is part of WPP’s pledged annual investment of £250 million in AI, data, and technology. WPP’s chief technology officer Stephan Pretorius said the deal significantly upgrades the generative AI capabilities available to WPP and its clients, enabling it to “do things we could only dream of a few months ago”.
WPP Open is essentially a piece of software available to staff across WPP agencies, giving them access to various shared products and tools and enabling easier sharing and use of data across the organisation. As a result of this partnership, Google Cloud’s generative AI tools will be available within this platform, with access to WPP’s own marketing and advertising data.
The two companies say this will enable WPP’s clients to create brand and product-specific content using Google’s gen AI tools. WPP already runs a creative hub within WPP Open called WPP Open Creative Studio. The agency says within this studio, Gemini will be able to do a range of creative tasks including writing headlines and turning sketches into images. And WPP says Gemini 1.5 Pro’s sophistication means it is particularly useful for brands as it’s better at understanding brand guidelines, and can make sure creative fits a brand’s voice, colour palette, and fonts.
The two companies say the more advanced form of Gemini can handle “hyper-realistic product representation” – that is, it can understand physical products well enough to create accurate digital 3D models of them, which can then be used within marketing assets.
WPP outlined several other new capabilities too. The agency group said integrating Google’s AI will enable better content optimisation, helping to more accurately predict how marketing content will perform. It can give reasoning behind its predictions, and then offer recommendations of how to improve effectiveness. WPP pointed to AI narration as another fruitful area. Gemini can handle real-time streaming for description and narration, creating video scripts which can then be given realistic AI-generated voice audio.
“With Gemini models, we’re not only able to enhance traditional marketing tasks but also to integrate the end-to-end marketing process for continuous, adaptive optimisation,” said WPP’s Pretorius. “I believe this will be a game-changer for our clients and the marketing industry at large.”
Deals coming thick and fast
AI has been a dominant topic on agency holding group earnings calls over the last year or so, as each agency seeks to utilise and adapt to generative AI faster and more efficiently than their competitors.
While some are building AI capabilities in-house, the quickest way to provide clients with sophisticated AI capabilities is to sign deals with the AI tech giants. Thus, the agency groups have been racing to get deals done. WPP signed a major deal with Nvidia just under a year ago, Omnicom has deals with Google Cloud and Adobe, as does IPG, while Publicis has partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon. In many cases these deals see AI capabilities made available within each agency group’s equivalent of WPP Open.
But signing deals and getting access to generative AI technology is only half the battle. With all of the agencies having gotten access to advanced gen AI capabilities, the key differentiator will be building smart tools and applications on top of these AI models.
