Pomelli
(blog.google)273 points by birriel a day ago
273 points by birriel a day ago
What you’re talking about is the primary marketing collateral. But any good marketing campaign needs a ton of secondary or even tertiary marketing collateral
The first “real video” you talked about is meant to grab attention and tell users, honestly, what the product is about
But they’re not customers - yet. They need to be reminded about your brand again and again
You can’t run the same video every time - for one, its repetitive. And for two, its disruptive on the wrong channels
You will need static images and basic videos and even tweets across platforms to remarket to your audience
That’s where tools like this come in handy. You grabbed attention with the first video. But now you need to tell users that if they buy tomorrow, they get 15% off.
How is any of that making humanity better? How is any of that making the world a better place for us and our children to live in?
I think you might be seeing guys who do that well so it's a bit survivorship bias. For most, if you just record yourself talking for 1m and watch it back as a video it's incredibly painful and awkward. The filler words, tangents, weird pauses. It really made me have respect for great speakers
All of those people have already pass through a filter of self-selection
There's a person out there that's 1) knows how to bake amazing cookies 2) has no desire to record tik toks
Why is that you need both of those things combined to have a successful cookie business? Can't we desire a world where just being good at baking cookies is good enough? You don't ALSO have to record a bunch of tik toks?
Some products are so good they don't need marketing. Some marketing is so good the product doesn't matter. But most of the time you need both.
Even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis had a great product (idea): if doctors wash their hands, fewer of their patients will die. But his marketing (personality) was off-putting, and his ideas weren't accepted until after his death.
This works for the subset of people who have a good story or a real connection to their brand, but that's just not most businesses. I buy and operate e-commerce brands, and I can't do it both because I really don't want to be on camera and because "hey I bought this company that sells leather handle covers for cast iron pans, and I personally don't use them but the cashflow was good" is not so compelling as a message. Sometimes you just need messages that convey the value proposition of the brand. (And FWIW they are nice handle covers, I just prefer to use a kitchen towel to grab my cast iron.)
That said, I think video generation is at the point where someone will probably develop a product that fakes the kinds of videos you're talking about in the near future.
Interesting. Do you feel like the values you're propagating into the world align with your own personal values?
I know personally that if I recognized some kitchen apparatus or product is redundant, and a something I already own such as a rag will do, I couldn't in good conscious perpetuate what I see as needless consumerism just to put another dollar in my wallet.
Basically, if I couldn't get on tiktok and make an earnest video about why what I'm selling is useful and worth existing, and why it personally matters to me, I don't think I could sell that product in good conscience. Even if the customer truly thinks it's a great product, if I recognize the inherent waste and redundancy, I just can't buy into it.
I just always think about the chapter in Fight Club when the narrator's house blows up:
"You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."
> Do you feel like the values you're propagating into the world align with your own personal values?
> Basically, if I couldn't get on tiktok and make an earnest video about why what I'm selling is useful and worth existing, and why it personally matters to me, I don't think I could sell that product in good conscience.
Have you ever involuntarily gone to bed hungry even once in your life?
I would say a couple of things:
1. Just because I don't use something doesn't mean that I think it shouldn't exist or be sold. People can make their own choices. A product isn't bad or useless or unnecessary because it doesn't align with my preferences. I'm fine with people being able to make their own choices about what they buy. Also, I generally don't think people should have to live a totally ascetic lifestyle. I have three monitors - certainly redundant, but fine. I have art on my walls - could've gone without that. I have a dog who I buy toys and food for - not strictly necessary. These things are all more than fine in my book.
2. There are other reasons to be in business besides deeply caring about the business itself. The biggest benefit to this business is that it doesn't require a lot of day-to-day work, and I can do that work whenever I want. That means I can almost always be there for my kids. That's what matters to me. I would take a job that I don't particularly care about that lets me put them first over one that I'm deeply passionate about that takes them away from me any time.
This is depressing. We are already meat in the google ad-serving machine that tracks us, profiles us, gives us "free" stuff (gmail, anyone?) in order to feed us advertising.
Now even that advertising will be AI-generated. The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine, to be fed stuff paid for by advertisers and generated by machines.
Advertising is a negative sum game[0]. Helping smaller businesses without budget compete with larger companies on advertising is just contributing to making life worse for everyone.
There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck. There's no persistent advantage possible here, because whatever new cool thing a small business can do, a large business can do more of it and better
--
[0] - It's a zero-sum game in the sense that everyone's effort only serves to cancel out the effort of their competitors, but it's hugely negative to society in absolute terms, because all that effort burns labor and natural resources.
There's an argument to be made that if everyone is doing it then it will stop being effective and brands will have to start reaching for more honest forms of marketing/advertising their product. I think we've already gone through a cycle of this with influencer marketing where a decade ago, if a Youtuber recommended a product it had a lot more weight (eg. I could actually imagine a lot of creators using Audible/Squarespace) than today where most people realize it's just a way for them to make money and doesn't really hold much weight.
I tried this out, and the stuff it produces is just simple text overlaid nicely on images you supply. If you have a designer, it'd take 60 seconds to knock one of these out, plus you'd already have a style guide that this app wouldn't follow closely enough to use. This is definitely for small businesses.
A Modest Proposal:
We set all our servers to listen on port 4443, and walk away from the whole sorry mess.
Make it all again from scratch. Block whole swathes of IP ranges known to belong to FAANG.
> The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine.
Question is, if the AI bros are right about a "new industrial revolution", will there be consumers to consume if all the wealth is concentrated in the top 1-2% of the population? (the owners of AI hardware and software)
If that happens it won't be the AI people who benefit. The wealth will be concentrated among the present capital owners. Even many top AI experts who contributed critical research won't become rich.
You'll see the wealth concentration you talk of, but it'll be completely different people who get this wealth, maybe even people who own businesses where wages are a large outlay.
The answer is already in your question. The original Industrial Revolution concentrated wealth and yet increased the baseline wealth for everyone else.
There is no reason to believe otherwise in this revolution.
Though for those of us above the current baseline (e.g. basically everyone reading this), it’s not guaranteed that the new baseline will be above our current lifestyle.
Question is, if the AI bros are right about a "new industrial revolution", will there be consumers to consume if all the wealth is concentrated in the top 1-2% of the population?
Who cares? That's two quarters away. What matters is that I got my Lambo and my speedboat today. Let the poors worry about the future.
Personally I'm okay with that as it weakens the argument that ads are content, a dubious argument often used by ad companies.
One of the best arguments in favor of ads is that high-quality ads act as an honest/credible signal that a firm is a serious business offering a serious product. Through making the production of high-quality ads cheap, people who are truly passionate about their small business will be "disrupted", and scammers/fly-by-night operations will be "supercharged".
I'm sure they will, this industry is completely delusional and out of touch with reality
People can choose to not consume crap they don’t need. They won’t, but they can.
Advertising is now just worthless noise to me because I generally don’t buy stuff anymore but what I need.
I can’t imagine why anyone would buy most of the crap I see advertised, but they do. Halloween was a recent example: how many tons of plastic shit for costumes was shipped from China only to be thrown away the next day? How much candy was bought? Even when I was 12 I started to see what a disgusting consumerist affair the whole thing was and it lost its appeal. And yet we have adults participating.
The ad machine exists because people let it be successful.
Would you make the same argument for smoking?
I think we’re in a world so dominated by the attention economy and things optimized to hook us in that it’s hard to just say “I quit”.
> They won’t, but they can.
That is the problem with this advice. “Can choose not to” is code to stop someone complaining. “Just don’t use it then”. It sounds equivalent to the “love it or leave it” slogan used in the 70s in America.
We don’t leave. We fight. We don’t stop using. We openly and publicly criticize
Probably good for mom and pop shops, and super useful for someone who has a couple of restaurant locations or a few small grocery stores. I know a lot of places don't update their IG or whatever with specials for the week or basically anything because it's time and effort, if someone was running a campaign for a week of say a free side with a burger, but wanted to do a different side every day you could pick for free, you could churn stuff like that out super fast with this.
I tried it. I used it first for my stuff and thought wow I'd never use this for my stuff, but my stuff isn't a mom and pop burger joint with the kids working on weekend etc, I will show it to the lady who has the pho shop next door, maybe she will update her IG with her specials more often than "whenever I remember".
The whole (original) premise of social media was "let's make a more human side of our business so that people can connect with us". Now we've come full circle where the robots are making all the social content and increasingly the robots are the ones consuming it too.
Weird, uncanny valley times. And, FWIW, not times I want anything to do with, hence why I've been off all social media for years now...
2 min tl;dr video by Culture Kings (streetwear brand) founder
Suspicious-me is wondering how Google are going to treat AI generated marketing slop created using Pomelli differently to slop created with other tools (or even human created marketing content) in search ranking?
If I were an EvilGoogle manager, I'd have an enshittification playbook complete with a timeline and KPIs/OKRs mapped out - and probably already linked to individual engineer's promotion/RIF futures.
They know exactly who's using this tool and which company they're using it on behalf of.
In the short term I'd have those companies webpages using Pomelli generated content to rank highly, and for advertising on those pages to show higher then usual clickthrough rates - and probably gradually downrank non-Pomelli pages on their sites. Once it becomes well known that Pomelli generated content genuinely generates more revenue that other options (even though that's only because Google have their thumb on the scale), everybody is going to jump on the gravy train, and a sub-industry of Pomelli consultancies/agencies will show up, like specialist SEO firms did way back.
Gradually that new "Pomelli Content Optimisation" will capture a significant-enough slice of the web content generation pie, and Google will start to sell them "Pro" subscriptions and features, while at the same time reducing functionality and effectiveness of the tools individuals and end-user companies have access to - driving even more revenue into the PCO industry.
Eventually, when enough companies are fundamentally reliant on external PCO vendors, Google will ramp up the pricing of their tools.
(With any luck AGI will have turned us all into paperclips before that runbook plays out.)
Google actually doesn't give a single flying fuck about AI slop because they produce it themselves and believe AI slop will feed their quarters going forward.
They sometimes pretend to care but not really. You can already stuff Google Merchant full of ai-generated slop images that have little to do with how an actual product looks like and that's something they could easily control if they wanted... but do they? Nah, they're going the other way, creating shit like Product Studio and that's just the beginning.
Make no mistake, Google is going all in on slop - search, ads, youtube, merchant, workspace, cloud, everything
That's also my opinion, they didn't care about non-AI generated slop either before that so why would they now?
If they cared, it would be trivial to scan for and block ads on YouTube that literally say "I am Elon Musk. Click the link below to message my assistant to start making money. This is a special message only for you." With a badly deep faked video of Elon Musk.
I doubt Pomelli would get ranked higher. Google biases ads to their highest spenders. The more you spend, the better your ads perform. Nobody using something like Pomelli is giving Google enough money to rank highly. They could outrank the very lowest spenders, namely scammers and dropshippers whose ads are already AI slop anyway. But, really, who cares?
They are going all in on tolerating third party AI slop on Youtube. That feels like an executive decision at this point.
Guessing: because they have AI products in the pipeline that can create Youtube shorts or similar.
This aspect will be interesting to watch.
Edit: Youtube Premium should include an optional AI slop filter.
Link goes to a page with a minimal hint and a video.
Their blog post has some detail: https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/pomelli/
Kagi said the "Key features and functionalities of Pomelli include:
Content Generation: Pomelli can generate various marketing assets
such as social posts and ad creatives by analyzing
a company's website to understand its brand identity
Brand DNA: The tool builds a "Business DNA" from a company's
website to ensure generated content is consistent with the brand's identity
Campaign Creation: It aims to generate entire on-brand marketing
campaigns with minimal user input
Editable Assets: The generated campaign assets are editable
Canva Alternative: Pomelli is positioned as a competitor
to design tools like Canva"OK, we'll put that link at the top and https://labs.google.com/pomelli/about/ in the toptext. Thanks!
Manually mentioning my conflict of interest when astroturf-advertising my product? That sounds way too tedious, inconvenient and inefficient. You have to remember to check if you're advertising right now, and there's not even an easy API to call for that. Now, I was just looking around the web the other day, and randomly stumbled into this brand new service, TavAutoAdMention, it's so good! I love its creator, too!
It really does not help me as a small business if Pomelli creates (shitty) AI content, but does not open the gates to actually reach people/customers.
From the article: "..like your social media, your site and your ads..."
I failed with my platform in the sense of online marketing. Although the platform itself did not fail, it has a solid user-base, but not enough reach to make a living from it.
Why did I fail from a marketing perspective? Because my social media, blog, ad words, etc. all do not have enough reach! The human made content itself is good and never was the problem. Reach it is!
This tool would not solve my problems.
This tool is a content generator. It does not create reach. So I think I do not get your question? If you read the Pomelli article it states in the first sentences that Pomelli will help small businesses by creating campaigns. "Pomelli is an AI marketing tool designed to help SMBs more easily generate scalable, on-brand social media campaigns to help grow their businesses." But my point is, those campaigns are useless, if you do not have reach already. So, Pomelli does actually not help small business as they are stating, but instead is wasting your time and money, because you will end up in buying some ad words from Google.
It's pretty bad. It generates mangled text and objects with bad proportions.
Dare I ask: who owns the IP to all the generated content? User? Google? Some complex arrangement governed by a 20-page ToS?
AFAIK and this may have changed, but at least in the US, AI-generated content is not copyrightable so it's effectively public-domain.
I think in reality its very much still undecided law in most ways that practically matter and a lot of decisions will still be made based on the pay rates of the lawyers for the different parties involved.
As a simple example, assume a specific LLM-based tool (like Google's own, or someone else's) happens to generate a social media mascot for you that looks a lot like the modern rendition of Mickey Mouse.
Let's see how long that creation flies as public domain because it came out of an AI (that almost certainly consumed a giant amount of content produced by Disney as part of its training).
Such content is already available. As an experiment I entered “zombie elsa” into google and I found some very disturbing youtube videos, e.g.: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M5urB3u4aRk .
If you want a specific tool, here is Elsa with a cigarette generated using Midjourney and more: https://journeyaiart.com/tag/Elsa .
It's not that any content created by AI is not copyrightable, it's that work created solely by AI without human input is probably not copyrightable.
See also [1] mentioned in the framework linked by sibling comment, AI copyright is essentially a logical extension of this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
That's incorrect. Start at "legal framework" on kage 7: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
The short version is the copyright office says it is possible works by creative human authors using AI tools are partially copyrightable in many cases.
Copyright or not, surely there's ToS that you're expected to just click through and not read.
This is what I've been pondering, people are using Claude etc. to produce software. Do they think about this copyright issue at all? Basically whatever they produce with Claude should be not copyrightable.
But what happens if they MIX some of their own code with AI-generated code, is that combination then their copyright? With such combined output it would be very difficult to determine which part was created by human, which by AI, and which by AI but slightly modified by human.
In the domain of graphics the AI could put in some markers which tells the graphic is AI-generated, but with code that is probabaly not possible, code is code and can always be edited by humans.
A separate question is that if I use Claude to generate some code but then stamp the output with my copyright notice, am I doing something illegal?
I’ve been thinking long and hard about how AI could disrupt the field of ads creative, because a significant part of my income is tied to motion design applied to html5 banner campaigns for large companies in Europe.
What I see is that clients that invest in a campaign do not want to think about what an AI can produce. They don’t want to interact or brief an AI, they don’t want to do feedback rounds with an AI. They want a group of professionals that knows them to take over and do it all. If the professionals then use some AI for it, they mostly don’t care.
This is true so far for any campaign that allocates relevant funds (mid 5 figures and upwards). When it comes to the actual creation phase, right now AI is fundamentally immature and incapable of being controlled past the creation of static content.
All the motion and animation part for example is still somehow terra incognita for these tools. Take Adobe Animate, which is the go-to tool for anything 2D-animation, or Google Web Designer. Zero AI-features, simply because you can’t LLM frame by frame animations and have a result that is as precise as you need it. Or maybe you can, but for some reason these companies don’t see a business case for allocating resources to this specific development.
These tools can be great for smaller business that won’t have access to large campaigns, but as someone else mentioned, why do that when hiring a working gen-z social media native student will cost you slightly more, and possibly perform 100-times better with their native social media aesthetic?
Ps: Pomelli means door handles in Italian, and that’s… weird? Feels like a name randomly regurgitated by an LLM as well.
The AI start-up field is going to be eviscerated. I too have the irresistible urge to bolt a SOTA LLM back end on a custom harness and charge $20/mo, but the total lack of a moat and ease of replication kills any motivation.
You have to either have some big cajones or be totally lost to think it's a good idea to create a startup that is just a simple cheap veil on someone else's extremely advanced and expensive product
No matter how it pans out.
If no one uses it, that means the market has proven, no audience for this kind of product. Google loses, everyone else loses.
If everyone who wants this sort of thing uses it, that's it, Google won, everyone else loses.
The outcome to sell to investors is the least believable: people will pay for some offering when a nearly identical one is available directly from Google for free. And anyway, they have the best generative creative tech, so how could anything be better than Google's?
Bill Hicks would not mind
Everything about this, and I mean everything, makes me want to vomit.
I'm so glad we're all in this Faustian nightmare together, because as it all goes wrong we'll have a clear incentive to band together and help each other, right? Just like a lot of little Fausts would do.
The company that is responsible for filling the Internet with junk is just going to help fill the Internet with even junk crap. Who would have thought about that?
I'd rather spend $50 on Fiverr and get human generated content.
I am genuinely surprised that people still get excited about Google announcing new products/services given their track record. Unless it's core to its businesss model, this will probably get axed in a couple of years.
Just how many Gen ai products are they half assedly launching (in case of Google).
Honestly, I'm fine with Google doing it. If not them, then some regulatory arbitrage startup will do it with way more de-facto scam and fraud. Google is not some morale arbiter for the long arc of technology -- look at how they gatekept their LLM technology and got wrecked by the people who actually commericalized it: OpenAI.
AI is going to kill Canva, Figma, and Adobe. Without a doubt.
Nano Banana alone obsoleted all of Photoshop. (And the Chinese versions of Nano Banana are even better!)
I'm most worried for my friends in creative though. I have some extremely talented friends at WPP and other agencies. Everyone is shaking in their boots.
Nobody's buying ads because of the economy, then these tools are nipping at their heels. They've already had one massive round of layoffs, and there's another one supposedly happening early next year.
Where are these millions of people going to go? These are six figure income earners.
There are five million marketing professionals in the US. If half of them lose their jobs, then what? What's lined up for them after this?
If AI fails, the economy goes boom.
If AI succeeds, the economy goes ... bigger boom?
I used to think the tools would wind up creating more work, especially in narrative creative work. Outside of A24 and indie/foreign films, Hollywood is so trite. These models drop Pixar/Disney VFX into the hands of every YouTuber - and that could be really cool when used by the right people. Like the Corridor Crew folks.
Maybe gaming and media will see a boost, but advertising and marketing folks are really going to get hit hard.
The reason most creative media is good is because you see the vision of a creative team or individual.
If the vision is diluted due to lack of control afforded by AI tools, then the tools won’t be used.
Many times in Hollywood have we seen directors spend unjustifiable amounts of money in the pursuit of creative control.
Hand camera tracking a dinosaur in Jurassic Park, developing a novel diffraction algorithm for THE ABYSS, hand-drawing 3-Dimensional computer animations for 2001, creating an entire scale model practically for a single fight scene in LOTR.
AI allows you to get anything. The best movies are a direct reflection of a particular vision. AI can’t provide this and I see no way to solve it.
A natural response is - well directors already outsource some creative control to VFX artists so why not to a machine instead.
Because an artist can control everything. Even if the artist is prompting a model, at the end of the day an artist can drill right down to the tooling itself (photoshop for example) and exactly achieve the vision.
I don’t see AI achieving this granularity while maintaining its utility. It’s a sliding scale of trading utility as a time saving device for control.
If you lean too far to the control side, well you might as well fire up photoshop. If you lean too much to the utility side, you sacrifice creative control.
When looked at under this lens the utility of AI generation is actually limited as it solves a non existent problem. One can think of it as an additional piece of tooling for use only as a generational tool where there is less need for control, such as for background characters.
The team at Red Barrels, for example, train a local model on their own artwork to automatically generate variant textures for map generation. Things such as this. No need to be doom and gloom about this stuff.
> lack of control afforded by AI
You should look at ComfyUI.
Control is here, it's just not widely distributed or easy to use.
If you're patient, you can fully control the set, blocking, angles. You can position your characters, relight them, precisely control props, etc. You have unlimited control over everything. It's just a mess right now.
Fucking region gating in this day and age.
Sometimes even with a US account some things flop when you try to use them while traveling. You'd think the richass CEOs travel a lot so they would notice this problem but then you realize they never use their own products and have meat intelligence do all their shit for them anyway.
This is just going to breed mistrust, possibly end up hurting businesses. Generally speaking, there are two categories of marketing when it comes to the products I buy.
The first is the quality mass produced products like laptops, cereals, frozen pizzas, etc which have enough revenue that they can hire human marketing to come up with unique content, packaging and ads. The other category, is _high_ quality locally produced goods, like cheese, meats, and some clothing (for example) which do not have enough revenue to hire dedicated marketing staff, but instead use informal marketing. Marketing beyond simple ads in the later case barely matters since there is a lot of trust that the product is quality.
Now there are a lot of garbage products out there, mostly from dollar/discount shops, drop shippers, online shops, and sometimes supermarkets. Margins on these cheap products is usually thin, so if they can save a few bucks with Pomelli they will probably use it.
I'd argue that most people today have become very sensitive and well trained to sniff out poor quality products, its easy to get ripped off. Cues of poor quality could be the design of the packaging including language and fonts, the weight and feel of the product or the brand name when it comes to amazon products sold by Mosptnspg, DSPEAE , Sdarming or whatever lol.
Is the cue to poor quality not going to become Pomelli-style designs? People are already sensitizing themselves to genAI content, and Pomelli is unlikely to produce designs time after time again which are unique enough to bypass a good eye.
I’ve seen many small businesses do well on TikTok and Instagram by eschewing all fancy graphics and technology, and just talking into their phone’s camera like a normal person. “Hey I’m Joe, I just opened a cafe down here. It’s always been my dream, etc.” The more quirky and human the video, the better it does.
I know this new tool looks to be for static graphics; but I do think the same thing applies. Not using AI-generated polished graphics will become a differentiator.