by Liam, Digi Guru
Google held its Marketing Live event last week, and I (Liam, Digital Marketing Account Manager @ Flourish) came away with a stack of key talking points ranging from genuinely interesting to “we’ll see”. Rather than rehash every feature release, here are the six areas where Google’s making substantive changes – and what that means for your campaign performance.
Ads in AI Mode: When Ads Start Having Conversations
What’s actually happening?
The headline capability Google’s testing is called Ads in AI Mode. When someone uses Google’s Gemini AI interface to ask questions or research products in Google’s search engine, ads can now appear directly within those AI-generated responses, clearly labelled as “sponsored content”.
Why is it interesting?
What struck me isn’t the placement itself – brands have chased “native” formats for years – but the underlying mechanism. These ads, powered by Performance Max and AI Max, are designed to explain why your product answers the question being asked. If someone’s asking Gemini about running shoes for marathon training, the ad articulates why your specific model suits long-distance running.
My thoughts…
From a marketing standpoint, you’re no longer optimising for keywords or audiences in the traditional sense. You’re optimising for relevance to the question. That means your product data, campaign briefs, and creative assets all need to be rich enough for an AI to construct a compelling, contextual argument on your behalf. Generic brand messaging won’t cut it anymore.
The practical question is whether people will adopt AI Mode as primary search behaviour. For marketers, the takeaway is less about rushing to enable these ad formats (they’re still in testing) and more about auditing whether your campaign inputs are descriptive enough to support this kind of automated reasoning – well, are they?
UK Rollout Reality
Expect a delayed, phased launch. Consumer-facing AI features usually pilot in the US first. When it crosses the Atlantic, expect a closed beta for major UK brands before a wider rollout.
AI Brief: Briefing Campaigns in Plain English
What’s actually happening?
This connects directly to the second announcement: AI Brief. Starting with AI Max for Search campaigns, Google’s letting you steer campaign behaviour using natural language instructions (you type, it reads) rather than fiddling with settings and exclusions.
You can set three types of guidelines: Messaging (what your ads should and shouldn’t say), Matching (which searches to capture or avoid), and Audience (who to reach with tailored messages). Google shows you sample assets and searches before launch, so you can confirm you’re happy with the direction.
Why is it interesting?
This is Google catching up to what practitioners have wanted: the ability to set campaign guardrails without building complex exclusion lists. It’s not revolutionary – plenty of marketers have used manual negative keywords to achieve similar control – but it significantly lowers the barrier. What used to require technical expertise can now be articulated in a sentence.
My thoughts…
Campaign setup becomes less about technical configuration and more about clear strategic thinking. If you can’t articulate what you want your campaign to do in a few sentences, AI Brief won’t magically solve that. But if you can articulate it, you’ll get there faster.
UK Rollout Reality
I reckon this one will be coming to the UK quickly. It’s an English-language, advertiser-facing productivity tool, UK accounts will probably be part of the primary wave. Look out for an “Opt-in” experiment in your dashboard some time in 2026.
Direct Offers: Making the Deal at the Moment of Discovery
What’s actually happening?
Direct Offers lets advertisers surface exclusive promotions – discounts, bundles, local offers – directly within AI Mode and Search results at the moment someone’s researching products.
The new functionality for 2026 expands this in three ways: placement now includes the AI Mode answer itself (not just the product viewer), bundling lets you upload multiple promotions and let Gemini construct customised deals for specific searches, and buyers can complete their purchase without leaving Google’s search results.
Why is it interesting?
The bundling capability is the most interesting bit: if someone’s searching for “home office setup under £500,” Gemini might bundle your desk, chair, and lamp into a package that hits that budget. For travel, Google’s extending Direct Offers to hotel bookings during trip planning.
My thoughts…
For retail and e-commerce, it’s useful – another lever when conversion rates need a nudge. The strategic question is whether this trains shoppers to expect deals at every touchpoint, or whether it builds trust by ensuring good value without hunting elsewhere. Either way, it’s another signal that Google’s trying to own more of the customer journey, not just the top of the funnel.
UK Rollout Reality
Delayed for the UK. Features involving “native checkout” inside search results require strict clearance from UK financial and anti-competition regulators. The US will be the testing ground for this one.
Asset Studio: Asset Management That Finally Makes Sense
What’s actually happening?
Asset Studio is Google’s centralised hub within Google Ads where you can import existing assets (from Merchant Center, YouTube Studio, Adobe, Canva, or your creative folder), upload brand guidelines as PDFs, and generate new creative – all in one place.
What’s new for 2026 is the breadth of integration. You can pull content from Google properties natively, connect third-party platforms via APIs, and use PDF uploads to anchor everything to your brand’s visual and messaging identity. Once assets are in the library, you can programmatically generate text and images through the Google Ads API for custom workflows.
Why is it interesting?
If you’re managing campaigns across multiple formats, you’re probably juggling assets across different ads platforms. Asset Studio consolidates that.
My thoughts…
The marketing value is operational rather than strategic. It’s less about unlocking new capabilities and more about reducing friction: faster creative production, better brand consistency, fewer tools to context-switch between.
UK Rollout Reality
Launching seamlessly in the UK. This is an infrastructure upgrade to existing Google Ads API and Merchant Center frameworks. With zero regulatory or language hurdles, it’ll most likely be hitting global and UK accounts as a standard UI update.
Creative Insights and Experimentation: From Guessing to Knowing
What’s actually happening?
Google’s invested in making creative testing less painful. The standout feature is “Save and Set Experiment” – when you edit a Performance Max ad or asset group, you can turn that change into a structured A/B test with one click. Google automatically creates a holdback of the previous version to measure exact performance lift.
Alongside this, creative analytics are now in Ask Advisor for real-time asset performance data. For Demand Gen campaigns, Gemini can review your creative during campaign setup and offer AI-driven suggestions – fixing logo placement, trimming videos, adjusting aspect ratios – with one-click implementations.
Why is it interesting?
Historically, proper creative testing required too much faff, so most marketers didn’t bother. If Google’s made it genuinely one-click, more brands will test, which raises the bar for creative performance across the board. The more interesting bit is proactive creative diagnostics in Demand Gen: if Google can surface issues before you launch, that prevents wasted spend rather than just measuring it after launch.
My thoughts…
Creative testing becomes default behaviour rather than specialist discipline. Teams that embrace testing will pull ahead of those relying on intuition.
UK Rollout Reality
Should be available to UK marketers soon. Features like the “Save and Set Experiment” one-click A/B testing are core platform updates built for global rollout. Expect to see these tools default in your UK campaigns shortly.
Ask Advisor: The AI That Follows You Around
What’s actually happening?
Ask Advisor is Google’s attempt to build a persistent AI assistant that works across its marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Merchant Center, and more. It’s powered by Gemini and designed to remember context across sessions and platforms.
In Google Ads, Ask Advisor handles campaign creation (build Performance Max campaigns from scratch), troubleshooting (diagnose and fix policy violations), and analytical insights (ask “why did performance increase?” and it surfaces the drivers). In Google Analytics, it acts as an “agentic data analyst” – you can ask complex business questions, and it generates visualisations and summaries, proactively suggests optimisations, and delivers critical updates via email if you so choose.
Why is it interesting?
What caught my attention is the cross-platform integration. The same advisor that helped you build a campaign in Google Ads can jump into Analytics to explain performance drivers, then surface relevant product data from Merchant Center. That continuity matters.
My thoughts…
The sceptic in me sees Google making its platform stickier. The optimist sees genuine reduction of the expertise barrier. Both are probably true.
Ask Advisor is worth enabling once available, but don’t expect it to replace strategic thinking. It’s a productivity tool, not a strategist. It’ll help you move faster and surface patterns you might have missed, but it won’t tell you whether your positioning is right or whether you’re targeting the wrong market.
UK Rollout Reality
Yes, but with strict UK data-privacy guardrails. While the cross-platform tool is rolling out, Google will need to comply with UK-GDPR. You’ll likely need to accept specific data-sharing permissions before the “cross-platform memory” fully activates.
What Google Marketing Live 2026 Means for Your Marketing Strategy
The common thread across these announcements is that Google’s making its advertising systems more conversational, more automated, and more interconnected. The shift is from “configure settings” to “articulate intent.” That benefits marketers who can clearly define their strategy, and it penalises those who rely on trial and error.
Here’s what marketers should be thinking about:
Audit your inputs.
If AI is constructing ads, composing bundles, and reasoning about relevance, the quality of your product data, brand guidelines, and campaign briefs becomes critical. Garbage in, garbage out, but at scale and with less visibility.
Articulate strategy in plain language.
The AI Brief model – where you describe what you want rather than how to configure it – is becoming the norm. If you can’t explain your campaign goals and messaging guardrails in a few clear sentences, you’ll struggle.
Expect higher creative standards.
When testing becomes frictionless and AI optimises technical quality automatically, your creative needs to be genuinely differentiated, not just technically competent.
Prepare for ecosystem lock-in.
Direct Offers with native checkout, Ask Advisor spanning Google’s tools, ads integrated into AI Mode – these keep users inside Google’s environment longer. Make sure you’ve got direct relationships and owned channels to balance that dependency.
None of this is cause for panic. The capabilities Google announced are practical implementations of conversational interfaces and automated reasoning. The question isn’t whether these tools work, but whether your team is set up to use them effectively. That means clear strategy, quality inputs, and the willingness to let AI handle execution whilst you focus on the decisions that actually matter.
