Paid Media 11 min read

5 ways to use Generative AI to boost your Paid Media campaigns

By Malcolm Gibb 20 January, 2025

Generative AI is transforming the way that marketers plan and assemble content for their Paid Ads.

As big platforms like Google, Meta and TikTok increasingly build the tools needed to create a raft of content types – from static images to more dynamic video – is more likely that marketers will be working with built in content creation tools that than their own creative departments.

Keen to explore more? Here are 5 of the latest ways you can use Generative AI to quickly create impactful content for your next campaign:

  • Leveraging the AI updates in PMAX and Demand Gen
  • Creating generative Ad assets in PMAX
  • Harnessing Google Merchant Center: Product Studio
  • Getting the best out of Symphony Creative Studio in TikTok
  • Using generative AI to produce scripts for Google Ads

1. Leveraging the latest PMAX & Demand Gen updates

Demand Gen and PMAX are effectively utilising Machine Learning or AI to serve ads across various formats and placements like YouTube, Gmail and Discover.

Broader Audience targeting on Demand Gen – is a useful upper funnel campaign type that enables marketers to drive results through:

  • Reach – show up as people stream, scroll, and connect on Google’s most popular, entertainment-focused touchpoints
  • Inspire – connect to audiences with ads that drive them to take action with formats that build on your brand or product story
  • Scale – bring your top-performing social video and image assets and scale their impact with Demand Gen’s unique AI-powered solutions

A recent update to Demand Gen now means that targeted audiences will now be seen as ‘signals’ rather than target groups. Which means potentially broader reach as Google’s algorithm can use these signals to optimise ad delivery as well as the opportunity to discover high-performing audience segments the algorithm identifies. This is quite a significant change which, despite the fact that it removes an element of control from marketers, has the potential to serve Demand Gen campaigns to a much broader audience. So, this is a development to keep an eye on.

PMAX is evolving – Performance Max (PMAX) is a Google Ads campaign type that uses AI to help advertisers reach more customers across Google’s advertising channels.

We have had a lot of success with PMAX for our customers across Lead Gen and Retail and you can include shopping video in there as well. It has evolved over this year to become much smarter including:

  • adding brand exclusions which has been really useful as PMAX has encroached on brand search territory.
  • adding asset reporting which means you are now able to actually test the impact of assets to go into PMAX. So, if we’ve got new images or text we want to add into a PMAX campaign, we can look at that asset group and see what they have driven in terms of conversion rate uplift.
  • if you run shopping campaigns, PMAX will now not be prioritised over standard shopping campaigns anymore.

We work with some retail accounts where we have PMAX activity that also includes Shopping – and then we have also traditional Shopping campaigns because it gives us a bit more control over what is served in the product feed. Previously the PMAX campaigns would generally overlap and there wasn’t much control over what served first.

Google have announced that standard Shopping campaigns will have priority over PMAX based on the Ad rank. So, it is important to make sure that with Shopping campaigns, that the Shopping ad rank is best.

2. Creating generative Ad assets in PMAX

Google has continued to add to the Generative AI capabilities in PMAX by delivering updates to reporting capabilities and adding its own image generation tools.

So, if you’re lacking creative production resources and you don’t have the assets available, you can have Generative AI produce images through the platform.

It is early days on this – but it might work for things like furniture, kitchens or interior areas and maybe even travel. The kind of areas where you could scale creatives massively across your asset groups by adopting this kind of model, rather than having to get your creative department to produce loads of images. As of this month it is also able to do short videos – and Google is updating towards an imaging free model which should mean higher quality production. So, things are evolving here and it could pay dividends to test and play with the new functionality as it comes.

3. Harnessing Google Merchant Center: Product Studio

Merchant Center is a free tool that helps millions of shoppers on Google discover, explore and buy your products.

If you’ve got product feeds, Google Merchant Center has launched Product Studio which is a similar generative tool to those above. But, in this case it takes your product from the product feed and enables you to easily create things like backgrounds or alter the image itself.

This can be really powerful to help the product stand out and do a better job of testing creative – so definitely one to have a look at. And if you’re running product ads it makes it easy to test a white background versus a contextual one.

4. Getting the best out of Symphony Creative Studio on TikTok

For anyone who is running TikTok ads, they recently integrated Symphony Creative Studio, which is powered by AI and a really powerful video creative suite.

This can create things like video from prompts and you can even create things like lifelike avatars that speak from a script. If you are doing TikTok ads, this can help you cross the barrier for production in creating TikTok ads because that can be very different to Meta or Google. It can speed up that process or even just create a whole suite of ads based on AI.

Symphony is more than just a creative suite. TikTok also has its own chatbot assistant, which offers functionality like ChatGPT. You can ask it things like produce a creative insight report for this sector and it will give you examples of ads, popular keywords and hashtags that are relevant. It can help you plan your ads to go onto TikTok – which is probably the kind of thing that we’re missing for Google, where we have to go to Google reps and ask for that kind of information.

These types of tools are the way that the big platforms are going in terms of generative content production – by trying to give advertisers easy to use tools that enable you to quickly create content and get it live on their system. There may be use cases where you can’t use this approach – particularly in sectors like Finance and Healthcare – but they are worth exploring to see if they can speed up your creative marketing processes.

Using Generative AI to produce scripts for Google Ads

Another useful way to use generative AI is to produce things like scripts for Google Ads.

We’ve done this quite a few times where we’ve had a use case that doesn’t exist either in a data connector or within the platform.

If you don’t know how to write JavaScript, it’s also fairly simple to just write a little prompt in ChatGPT which says something like: 

“write me a google ads script that produces data into a google sheet and categorises campaigns by themes based on the adgroup name. The script should output a table of themes with key metrics such as impressions, clicks, cost, conversions, click through rate (CTR%), conversion rate %, impression share %.  

It will output to a Google sheet. You just need to copy that, put it into scripts, maybe edit it a little bit, debug it and put a Google sheet URL in there and now you’ve got a working script.

And there is more on the horizon

And it looks like there is a lot more to come based on Google IO announcements as well.

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