Google Highlights the Latest Developments in Creative AI
In both 2023 and 2024, AI has been an overarching theme at Cannes Lions. However, Vidhya Srinivasan encapsulated how things are different this year. “Last year, it was all about What is AI? This year is really about the how”. Srinivasan, Vice-President and General Manager of Advertising at Google along with Alexander Chen, Director of Google’s Creative Lab, dove into the details of AI in the Cannes Lions session “The AI Era: Supercharging Marketing and Creativity”. Their talk led the audience through Google’s new AI tech, and how it can help creatives ideate, create, and expand.
Ideate
The talk demonstrated how AI can support the ideation process by analyzing various file formats and fostering conversational brainstorming.
Chen began the session by showing off AI studio’s ability to analyze complex inputs, such as photos, large videos, and even hand drawings. He showed how the AI was able to understand his 9-year-old’s drawing of an imaginary machine. The model was then able to break down almost every detail of a 20-minute video, even recalling the exact offerings of a lunch menu that was on screen for 2-3 seconds.
Srinivasan also explained other ways that AI can support the ideation process. She explained how Media.Monks used Gemini to help develop market personas for Hatch. The team was able to use Gemini’s collaborative features to adjust, enhance, and perfect the Personas.
Create
The session also showed off a few different ways creators can use AI to produce impressive images and videos.
Chen used Google’s GENTYPE to create custom typefaces using simple prompts. He showed off fonts made out of Jello, Ramen, and Jellyfish. He then demonstrated how his team used AI to create “AI Roadtrip”, a series of promotional videos created using various AI tools. The videos featured Google Pixel and iPhone going on a road trip to various audience-requested locations. Using AI, the team could respond with real-time content within as little as ten minutes.
Srinivasan then showed how Google’s Product Studio can instantly generate backgrounds that complement product photography. The AI can then turn this product photography into a short video. Google also offers Dream Screen, an image generator that creates backgrounds for YouTube shorts. Srinivasan also presented a demo of Veo, Google’s video generator, which can create short, high-resolution videos. Veo is unique in that it allows the user to request specific cinematic effects.
Expand
The session concluded by highlighting how AI can allow marketers to scale existing assets and ideas.
Chen featured the project, Infinite Wonderland. This project imagined the timeless classic, Alice in Wonderland, in 5 select artists’ styles. The project allows users to select any sentence in the novel and see it illustrated in one of the artists’ styles. This project shows AI’s ability to supercharge creative assets, taking a few different illustrations and scaling them nearly infinitely.
Srinivasan then showed how Google’s creative team used AI to take existing promotional assets and scale them into over 4500 different executions.
To conclude the talk, both of the speakers emphasized that AI is not creative by itself. It is still the role of the marketer to shape the aesthetic and persuasive direction of every advertisement. However, these new tools allow creatives to further push the boundaries and limits of advertising.
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