Google Cloud Exec: AI Bridges the Gap Between Brands and Consumers

If you ask any marketer to list four of the main challenges they face today, they will most likely say lack of staff, an insufficient budget, inability to effectively measure marketing impact and not enough personalization.

“Marketers 100% feel these pain points. So what’s happening now is everyone’s saying, ‘okay, I need an AI strategy. My AI strategy is going to help fix this,” said Alison Wagonfeld, chief marketing officer at Google Cloud.

“It’s not that you need an AI strategy,” she said. “It’s that you need to use AI to help run your strategy.”

Here’s how she sees AI addressing each of the pain points.

Lack of Staff

Wagonfeld recommends letting AI handle the bottom 30% of repetitive, boring tasks to free up staff for higher-value work such as spending time with clients, tackling administrative tasks, AI training, or self-development.

Also, use AI to create advertising assets or campaigns. Tools like Google Workspace, where marketers can upload a PDF file and instantly create different landing pages, assets and posts for various channels, can be useful, she noted.

Third, create different AI agents that specialize in certain tasks, such as customer engagement, creative and content development, measurement and insights, or media and coding.

Marketers can build these agents themselves.

“Sometimes agents can be a fancy word, but it can be something as straightforward as taking all of the customer references … putting them in a tool to just use and query, and basically create different types of materials,” Wagonfeld said last week at the HumanX conference in Las Vegas.

Insufficient Budget

Wagonfeld said every company watches its marketing budget. “How do you make your budget stretch 10 times further?” she asked.

One easy way is to use AI to generate images, so you can skip hiring a team to do photo shoots. AI can help you get the exact image you want, providing your prompt is detailed and robust.

Wagonfeld showed an image of a dog on a flamingo float in a pool.

The prompt was this:

A cinematic shot captures a fluffy Cockapoo, perched atop a vibrant pink flamingo float, in a sun-drenched Los Angeles swimming pool.

The crystal-clear water sparkles under the bright California sun, reflecting the playful scene. The Cockapoo’s fur, a soft blend of white and apricot, is highlighted by the golden sunlight, its floppy ears gently swaying in the breeze. Its happy expression and wagging tail convey pure job and summer bliss. The vibrant pink flamingo adds a whimsical touch, creating a picture-perfect image of carefree fun in the LA sunshine.

Credit: Google Cloud

The image can then be fed to a video generator like Google’s Veo 2 to create a video. This video can be sliced up into smaller chunks, say 8-second clips, to be distributed in different digital channels.

Another way to save is by using AI to reformat your video for use in multiple channels. Wagonfeld said YouTube’s AI tools can resize your video not only for its own channel but also to fit other channels, like Instagram.

“You’re not hiring people to do this, and you’ll save a whole bunch of money,” she said.

Read more: Google Reassures Investors in ‘Astonishing’ Month for AI

Marketing Impact Not Effectively Measured

“This is often a challenge in marketing. It can be expensive because you need a lot of data scientists or you need to be able to get a whole bunch of different technology,” Wagonfeld said.

But AI will let marketers to ‘talk’ with their data to the insights they need. AI enables them to ask questions in plain language and get answers.

“To be able to actually set this up once and not need people with all of the data science backgrounds to get the data and the insights you want has been really helpful,” she said.

Personalization Doesn’t Go Far Enough

Wagonfeld said marketers all know the four Ps in marketing: Product, Price, Promotion and Place. She wants to add a fifth P: Personalization.

Described as “the holy grail of marketing,” personalization lets brands deliver “the right message to the right audience at the right time,” she said.

But marketers are still missing the mark. According to a 2024 study by PYMNTS Intelligence, among 2,500 U.S. consumers surveyed, 83% said they are interested in customized discounts and promotional offers, but only 44% said what they actually get are relevant to their needs.

“Business owners should carefully craft data-driven deals that reflect an accurate understanding of a customer’s specific needs,” the report said.

That’s where AI can help.

“This is effectively what we’re all trying to do,” Wagonfeld said. “This is what we are able to do (now) because we can actually create experiences that were never even possible before at a such a customized micro level.”

To illustrate her point, Wagonfeld cited the example of how a marketing agency transformed Pods moving trucks into dynamic billboards displaying 6,000 different message variations based on which neighborhood they’re in. The result was a 60% increase in calls, usage and signups.

“We certainly can have personalization happen on one-to-many, one-to-one” scenarios, she said.

Wagonfeld identified four key AI marketing trends impacting the field:

Multimodal AI that can handle video, audio, image and text with large context windows so marketers can input more information

AI agents as the next evolution of chatbots

Assistive search that enables marketers to engage with their data across services and platforms

AI-powered customer experiences that are hyper-personalized

But Wagonfeld urged marketers to think beyond using AI to optimize existing processes.

She cited the example of the Lumière brothers, 19th century inventors of projected motion pictures who didn’t recognize the potential of their creation. Their shortsightedness is known as “Lumière’s Law” — people tend to view new technologies through familiar frameworks, limiting innovation.

“What we’re doing right now is we think about all the different types of marketing and say, ‘How can I use this technology to do this better, faster, cheaper, more effectively?’” Wagonfeld said. “But what I want to challenge all of us to do is think about the potential beyond this. How can we use this new technology to actually think about marketing in a whole new way?”

“It’s up to us to be the architects of what we are doing with marketing and to be able to use AI to do more than we ever thought possible,” she said.