Omnicom is integrating Google’s generative AI models into the agency’s ad tech to give brands generative text and image capabilities. Omnicom is touting the partnership as the first commercial use of Google’s generative AI technology, which the search giant has kept mostly under wraps until now.

“ChatGPT kicked off a whole revolution about generative AI large language models,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO, Omnicom Digital, during an interview at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. “What we’re announcing is that we’re the first ones to do a Google partnership with access to all their models … What we’re talking about today is it’s touching the commercial market for the first time in advertising.”

Omnicom is baking Google’s AI models into Omni, an internal marketing and data platform that works with cloud services, including Google Marketing Cloud. Google, Microsoft and Amazon all provide cloud services that are increasingly used in marketing operations and for applying AI. Omnicom will deploy two key Google AI models called Imagen and PaLM 2. Imagen is similar to DALL-E, for generating images, and PaLM 2 is Google’s large language model for text.

“Video is something that we are looking at very closely,” Nelson said, but the “technology just isn’t there.”

What’s promising about Google’s program is the copyright protections, Nelson said. Google trained its models using data that is “copyright free,” according to Nelson. The copyright question has impeded widespread adoption of some AI applications in marketing with agencies and brands concerned about using material they don’t properly license.

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“Their version of Imagen is particularly interesting because it’s copyright-free,” Nelson said, “which is a huge deal for us so it can be applicable to advertising.”

Omnicom will create custom AI models for brands to run operations by training the machines using data from the brands. The data can be an entire archive of a brand’s marketing copy. “This idea of ‘data stacking,’” Nelson said, “we add our data, clients’ data, and this works particularly well in media and optimization. So, we’re creating proprietary products out of the models.”

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This week, AI is all the rage at Cannes, and Google is playing catch up to OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT and DALL-E. Google was a pioneer in the research of large language models and natural language processing that helped pave the way for ChatGPT. Now, that tech is going into Microsoft and other platforms that are launching chatbot services, based on the uncanny text-generating abilities of ChatGPT. Google has made AI commercialization a priority and is launching new ways for advertisers to generate ads and manage ad campaigns with the assistance of AI.

“It allows marketers to create studio-grade images with mask-free editing for any business need, in a platform where they are already familiar, with only a few typing prompts,” June Yang, Google Cloud’s VP of cloud AI and industry solutions, said in the announcement.

Omnicom is focusing much of its week on AI developments. On Monday it announced the launch of Omni Assist, which is a ChatGPT-based chatbot. The AI assistant is powered by text prompts, just like ChatGPT, and it helps with “audience development to planning, activation, measurement, and optimization,” Omnicom said in an announcement yesterday. That tool, also embedded into Omni, was developed in partnership with Microsoft.