Google says Aye! Aye! To AI

Google has announced two new offerings for brands. One is an AI-powered AR Try-On process – which will give users a more accurate visualization of how certain apparel will look on them, based on their body type.

The other are new ad types - Demand Gen and Video View campaign options, both of which offer more ways to utilize AI in your creation and targeting processes. Demand Gen campaigns help brands make the most of their video and image assets, changing them into different Google ad formats, in order to maximize reach and appeal with specific users.

Demand Gen re-uses a brand’s creative elements in various formats across various Google properties. Google’s Video View campaign uses Google’s AI to target various relevant segments and lookalike segments based on a brand’s audience lists.

All these offerings are intended for brands to get the most traction out of their creative assets and also help with better targeting for the best responses possible.

The process should enable you to get the most out of your creative assets, while also optimizing targeting for optimal response.

Google’s Try-On process is geared to improve the online shopping experience with a new generative AI element for trying on apparels with digital models that better represent various body types.

Google has also introduced new ‘guided refinements’ to product searches, which allows users to add various additional qualifiers to product searches in the app.

All very welcome offerings from Google, one must admit!

AI being used to pick up existing content and adapt it to suit various formats is a great thing for brands. They don’t need to spend time creating various types of content. AI will do it for them. And since it is from Google, who better to know what exactly will work in the various formats that Google has! Marketers and brands do not need to spend time and energy, trying to figure out what will work and what wont, and then spend more time trying to adapt creatives to suit each format! A welcome offering from Google indeed!

Better targeting is also very welcome – truth be told, there is nothing quite like AI when it comes to segmentation and sharper targeting. So this also is a boon to marketers who would like their marketing messaging to reach the right people and at the right time. And since this tool can also find “also like” audiences – similar segments, the reach of brands will be wider and that will lead to more conversions and more revenues and ROI. This is welcome too!

Virtual try-ons are great for fashion brands and retailers – with the habits learnt during the pandemic and lockdowns still lingering and customers still doing a lot of online shopping, this is a great addition to a retailer’s tool kit. It can take any image of an apparel and demonstrate how it would fold or cling or stretch – how it would drape on a varied set of actual real models with different skin tones, of different ethnicities and hair types and various sizes in various poses.

This will enable brands to actually show customers how various outfits would actually look on someone like them. This goes a long way in enabling expanded AR Try-On options, and improving the online shopping experience as a whole for customers of fashion retailers.

Of course there are other options in the market (Snap’s offering for instance) which allows retailers to demonstrate to customers how an outfit would actually look on themselves – which is way better. But this is certainly a step in the right direction. Customers just need to tap products with the ‘Try on’ badge on them and then choose the model that best resonates with them and who they can most identify with.

With all the negativity that is buzzing that AI and its crazy uses will soon make Google obsolete, this is a great move from Google which is developing its own AI powered special offerings with generative AI components.

But where AI will lead us all to, we just have to wait and watch.