Every year, Google hosts Google Marketing Live, an event where they unveil the latest innovations in advertising and share how businesses can use Google Ads more effectively. The 2025 edition focused heavily on how artificial intelligence is transforming search, campaign performance, and creative production across the entire Google Ads platform.
At The Three Marketers, we stay ahead of these updates so you don’t have to. This year’s announcements include new campaign types like AI Max for Search, enhanced tools for Performance Max and Demand Gen, and smarter creative solutions using tools like Asset Studio, Veo, and Imagen. These updates are designed to help businesses like yours reach more qualified customers, improve the performance of your campaigns, and reduce the time and effort needed to create effective ad content.
In this article, we’ll explain each of these campaign types and tools in simple terms—and show how we’ll use them to help your business grow.
AI Max for Search Campaign
AI Max for Search leverages Google AI to boost search ad performance.
AI Max for Search is a new Search Ads option that uses Google’s AI to supercharge your search campaigns. This campaign type introduces a suite of AI-driven targeting and creative enhancements, bringing the best of Google AI to Search advertising. In practical terms, AI Max for Search can automatically find new, relevant search queries that your ads should show for – even queries you didn’t explicitly target – and serve tailored ads to those searches. It can also help expand your reach into AI-powered search results (for example, the new AI search overviews), ensuring your ads appear in the latest search experiences. The benefit for your business is expanded reach and higher-quality clicks: you can connect with more potential customers who are searching for relevant products or services, and do so with ads that are automatically optimized to match what those customers are looking for.
Performance Max Campaigns
Performance Max campaigns reach customers across multiple Google channels from one campaign.
Performance Max (often called PMax) is an all-in-one, goal-based campaign type that allows your business to advertise across all of Google’s channels via a single campaign. This means one Performance Max campaign can show your ads on Search, YouTube, Display Network websites, Discover feed, Gmail, Maps – everywhere Google Ads can appear. The advantage is a massively expanded reach: Performance Max finds potential customers wherever they are in the Google ecosystem. Importantly, it uses Google’s real-time AI to optimize for the goals you set (such as maximizing conversions or sales), so it helps you find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels. In other words, PMax will automatically allocate your budget to the best-performing channels and audiences, delivering more results by showing the right ad to the right person at the right time. Over the past year, Google has rolled out many improvements to Performance Max that increased conversion rates and gave advertisers more transparency and control. For example, there are new reports that let us see which platforms (YouTube, Search, etc.) are driving results and tools to guide the AI with negative keywords or asset preferences. What this means for you as a business owner is better performance with less manual work – Performance Max can drive more conversions and value while simplifying campaign management.
Demand Gen Campaigns
Demand Gen campaigns serve eye-catching visual ads on YouTube, Shorts, Gmail, and more.
Demand Gen campaigns are a new campaign type focused on generating customer interest through highly visual, immersive ads. A Google Demand Gen campaign is an AI-powered campaign ideal for serving visually appealing, multi-format ads on Google’s most prominent visual platforms – including YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Discover, and Gmail The goal here is to create and capture demand by engaging people with image and video ads in the places they spend time browsing and discovering (much like social media style advertising, but within Google’s networks). Demand Gen uses Google’s AI to optimize your video and image ads: it can automatically create the best combination of compelling visuals, ad messages, and placements to inspire users and drive them to take action. This campaign type also offers advanced audience targeting to help you grow your customer base – for example, you can use lookalike audiences (finding new people similar to your existing customers) to expand your reach efficiently. Additionally, you have control over where your ads show; new channel controls let you adjust your media mix (for instance, balancing spend between YouTube and other channels as needed). In short, Demand Gen campaigns help your business spark interest and reach new customers with engaging, visually rich ads. They are perfect for showcasing your brand or product in action and driving early-funnel engagement that can lead to conversions.
AI-Powered Creative Tools: Asset Studio, Veo, and Imagen
No modern ad campaign can succeed without great creative, and Google’s new creative tools are here to make producing images and videos for ads easier than ever. Asset Studio, Veo, and Imagen are three tools introduced (or enhanced) in 2025 that help marketers quickly generate high-quality visual content for their ads. Here’s a quick look at each:
- Asset Studio: This is a centralized creative hub within Google Ads for crafting and managing all your ad assets. Asset Studio brings together existing creative tools and new AI features in one place, streamlining your creative workflow. Using Asset Studio, we will be able to generate new image assets featuring your products (for example, placing your product into different backgrounds or “in action” lifestyle scenes) with just a few clicks. It’s essentially a one-stop shop to create, import, and preview ad visuals, which means faster production of banners, images, and even simple videos to use in campaigns. This is especially useful for small businesses that may not have in-house design teams – Asset Studio puts powerful creative capabilities at our fingertips to benefit your ads.
- Veo: Veo is Google’s latest AI model for video creation. It enables image-to-video transformation, meaning we can take a static image or a few assets and turn them into a short video clip. Video ads are very engaging, and with Veo, we can quickly produce professional-looking video snippets without expensive production crews. For example, if you have a couple of product photos, Veo can help animate them or transition between them with music and effects, creating a dynamic video ad that captures attention. Google has even introduced AI features like AI outpainting in videos (which can extend or reframe video content beyond the original shot) to adapt videos to different formats. In essence, Veo gives advertisers creative video superpowers.
- Imagen: Imagen is Google’s advanced AI image-generation model. It can create stunning, high-quality images from text or existing visuals. Within the Google Ads context, Imagen can help us generate custom images for your ads on demand. For instance, if we need a unique background or a lifestyle image of someone using your product but don’t have one on file, Imagen’s AI can create a realistic image to fit the need. This tool can also expand image content (similar to generative “outpainting”), which is useful if we need to adjust an image to fit different ad dimensions. The bottom line is that Imagen allows us to produce professional-grade imagery without a photoshoot – saving time and costs while still giving your ads a polished look.
Together, these tools ensure that your ads will have strong visuals and videos to attract customers. The result is ads that not only reach more but also resonate with viewers due to high-quality, relevant creative content.
Conclusion
The updates from Google Marketing Live 2025 mark an exciting step forward for advertisers, especially for small and medium businesses that rely on efficient tools to grow. Google is infusing its ad platform with AI at every level – from campaign optimization with AI Max for Search, Performance Max, and Demand Gen, to creative production with Asset Studio, Veo, and Imagen. The purpose of all these innovations is simple: to help businesses expand their reach, get better targeting and higher-quality clicks, and create compelling ads with less effort. As a client of The Three Marketers, you can be confident that we are already embracing these tools and campaign types to improve your results. Our team will handle the complexity – setting up the optimal campaign mix, employing Google’s AI features smartly, and producing great visuals – so that you can focus on running your business. The future of advertising is AI-driven, and with The Three Marketers as your partner, you’ll be at the forefront of these changes. We’ll ensure these new Google Ads features are used to grow your business and deliver the best possible return on your advertising investment, all in a simple and professional way that aligns with your goals.
Sources: Google Marketing Live 2025 announcements and Google Ads product updates
