Google Brings AI to Search Ads

Hello, let’s talk AI!

Today’s topics:

1. Gemini Chat will power Google’s Search Ads

2. Benedict Evans interview with Contagious on everything AI

3. Algorithms don’t hate AI, they just hate shitty content

Launching Google Search Ads Became Easy-Peasy

In the last issue, I talked about Google Bard's new AI Image Generator and how it offers some serious competition to OpenAI’s DALL·E 3. Onto this week’s AI updates from Google! 

Next time you want to launch a Search Ad campaign on Google, you can simply add your website URL and let Google AI step in to help you create optimized Search campaigns by generating relevant ad content, along with creatives and keywords.

The conversational chatbot will guide you through the ad creation process, answer questions, and even allow you to start over if you’re not satisfied with the initial output.

Every SEO writer and their grandma have been using ChatGPT to write headlines & descriptions for ads - but the utility here is beyond saving them a few clicks. This update will streamline the ad creation process and enhance campaign performance with significantly less effort, making it easier for small, lean businesses to stay competitive. 

Here’s an update from Google about this. LINK

And here’s a detailed guide on how to apply this yourself! LINK

Long Read

Contagious interviewed tech and media analyst Benedict Evans on the artificial intelligence ‘platform shift’ and why generative AI is giving people ‘infinite interns’.

Broadly, it talks about: 

• AI is a platform shift for the tech industry. It will bring about unprecedented changes, and we still haven’t explored all of them yet. 

• Current uses of AI are akin to people printing out their emails in the earlier years - people took a new tool and force-fit it to existing tasks. 

• Probabilistic answers vs deterministic answers

It’s a fantastic read, and adequately non-technical. 

“But you then have a moment where you think, ‘Okay, we’ve all tried this, but how do we understand what we do with it?’ Step one is everyone in an ad agency types some stuff into Midjourney and goes, ‘that’s fucking cool!’. And then you think, ‘Well, yeah, but we can’t just forward the client brief to Midjourney and then forward the Midjourney output to the printing company.’ A little bit more has to happen in the middle of that. It’s the same thing for a law firm or an engineering company. It takes time to work out how you turn this from an amazing demo into a product.”

Can AI Art Impress Algorithms? 

Apparently so! Consider this gorgeous Hufflepuff Room. 

It was created by Ben Myhre, a Norway-based designer who started conjuring architectural concept art with A.I. software a couple of years ago and posting it to Instagram, where he has accrued more than 530K followers. 

Unlike some of the tasteless renderings that choke social media, Myhre’s images are a product of several hours of labour, made with the help of his own photographs of buildings, the generative A.I. program Midjourney, the A.I.-powered photo enhancement program Topaz, and Photoshop.

He often leans into popular fandoms, creating images of homes inspired by Harry Potter, Santa Claus and “The Lord of the Rings.”

Check out Ben Myhre’s Instagram here. LINK

Read the source of this discovery, an NYT article - How A.I. Is Remodeling the Fantasy Home LINK

How is it relevant? 

It’s illustrative of the true magic of AI tools when used alongside original content ( or ideas) and other AI tools. Ben couldn’t have done this without AI, but he also couldn’t have done this without his excellent good taste! 

Remember this when you attempt to add AI tools to your workflow - use them for what they can do best instead of force-fitting. 

Thanks for reading! See you next week. 

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Kbye.