• Google is rolling out a new feature that will allow advertisers to create AI-generated ads for YouTube.
• The feature comes via Google’s AI-powered Performance Max tool, which was launched in 2021.
• It will also enable advertisers to create ads across a number of Google-owned platforms and services.

If your ad experience on YouTube has been poor of late, it could soon be a lot worse as Google has announced a new feature as part of its Performance Max tool that will allow advertisers to create their own AI-generated ads.

Development of the feature surfaced earlier this year, and now it looks like those initial reports were in fact true.

To that end Performance Max, which is already capable of working across all of Google’s products and services, will now be able to help advertisers create digital assets for use on a number of the tech giant’s platforms, including YouTube and Search.

“You’ll be able to generate new text and image assets for your campaign in just a few clicks. With the help of your knowledge and expertise, Google AI will generate assets that help you reach customers across all of Google’s performance inventory and formats. Performance Max will also take performance data into consideration when suggesting or generating certain assets for your campaigns to help your ads perform well,” it noted in a blog post.

“Our goal is to help marketers of all sizes drive greater performance. We want to help you generate and try creative concepts—whether that’s experimenting with new types of images and messaging or building your creatives from scratch,” it added.

While the tool’s functionality will no doubt prove a boon for smaller brands and companies unable to manage the cost involved for the creative on digital campaigns, it also means the frequency with which we see AI-generated ads on platforms like YouTube are set to increase.

We have already seen such video ads pop up on the platform in recent months, with clearly doctored footage of Elon Musk used to promote a cryptocurrency-related scam, already appearing.

Hopefully how it is implemented will be monitored or policed in some way, with Google making specific mention of guardrails for this system.

“We also have guardrails in place to prevent our systems from engaging with inappropriate or sensitive prompts or suggesting policy-violating creatives. Any ad created with generated assets is subject to our existing Ads policies before it serves and enforcement actions, if it violates our policies. And you’ll always have the opportunity to review all your generated assets before running them in a campaign,” the blog post advised.

The feature is available in beta in the United States at the moment, but Google plans to roll it out more regions by the end of 2023.

[Image – Photo by Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash]