Google is offering advertisers credits and free ad space to drive adoption of its AI-powered automated media buying tool, Demand Gen.
ADWEEK spoke to five advertisers across media agencies and brands who said Google has been aggressively pushing Demand Gen over the past year. Launched in 2023, Demand Gen selects advertisers’ best-performing video and image ads and serves them across YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Google Discover, and Gmail.
Two of those sources were offered ad credits recently, with one being offered $20,000 worth of free ad spend in credits to test Demand Gen over two months.
“It’s really an enticing offer,” the first ad buyer at a media agency said. “Google is continuing to push advertisers to Demand Gen whether they want to or not. Google reps are offering free credits, sending out marketing materials, and always including Demand Gen in their recommendations.”
Michael Lisovetsky, co-founder of ad agency Juice, said Google has offered ad credits intermittently over the past year, with the terms varying depending on brand type and budget.
“In some cases, Google is offering a dollar-for-dollar credit—if advertisers spend $5,000, they’ll receive $5,000 back—but in some cases, it’s only providing ad credits instead of a full match,” Lisovetsky said.
Google did not comment directly on the credits offered to advertisers.
But at least four sources contacted for this story are calling Demand Gen another ‘black box’ that, in some cases, performs worse than Performance Max–Google’s AI media buying tool that judges where budgets should be spent across Google’s properties, including search, YouTube, and the Google display ad network.
For years, Google has pushed advertisers to use Pmax to drive conversions within its ad ecosystem, shaking up its sales strategy to encourage more spend, and gradually offering buyers—who have groused about its opacity—more control.
A ‘black box nightmare’
A paid media executive at a finance-related brand testing Demand Gen described it as a “black box nightmare” with no visibility into where ads are placed. The buyer spent $380 on Demand Gen campaigns over the past two weeks but could only trace $0.65 of that spend to specific placements.