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Google’s added a new AI tool to help optimize your video ad performance.

Called “Creative Guidance”, the new option, built into the Google Ads platform, will assess your videos, and provide feedback on how to improve performance, based on Google’s best practices and requirements.

As explained by Google:

“To help customers better optimize their ads, we’ve launched creative guidance in both Recommendations and as a new feature in Video Analytics in Google Ads. Google AI now automatically provides dynamic best practice assessments for all of your videos, and notifies you when a key, data-backed creative best practice is missing. If you are missing a creative best practice, Creative guidance in Google Ads provides specific recommendations to help improve the effectiveness and performance of your video ad.”

So it’s a fairly basic feedback process at present, with the tool able to advise on whether you’re brand logo is present at the beginning of your clip, whether it meets the recommended duration best practices, if your chosen voice-over is effective, and whether you’re using the right aspect ratio.  

“If attributes are missing in your video ad, Creative guidance in Google Ads may suggest specific best practices with relevant actions you can implement in the “Ideas to try” section of Video Analytics below the retention curves or in the Recommendations tab. Based on the creative attributes detected, you’ll find high-impact changes you can make to your video ads along with links to useful tools that can help improve your video ad’s effectiveness and performance.”

So it’s not, like, gonna’ create a whole new ad for you (note: Meta is currently developing a system that may be able to do just that), but it will advise you on key requirements, to ensure that you’re maximizing your opportunities with your ads.

Which could be handy as a double-checking process to make sure that you haven’t forgotten anything, while Google also notes that it plans to add more elements into the checking system over time, which will see it recommend a broader range of elements to improve ad performance.

It’s another way to utilize AI, in a supplementary way, which is the best way to use the current machine learning systems.

Creative remains a challenge, and probably will for some time, because all AI features are inherently derivative, as they’re learning based on examples of content that already exists. So they can only come up with things that look like everything else. Which might still see them churn out some interesting creative, but for real, unique, stand-out content, it’ll still need a human touch.

For now at least, and given the way such systems work, it’s hard to see them actually “thinking” for themselves, and providing human-like creative elements in future.

But maybe that’s just wishful thinking. At least for now, creative thinking is safe from robots, but assistive tools like this can be highly valuable in your process.

You can learn more about Google’s Creative Guidance here.