Some, like veteran industry speaker and consultant Brad Geddes, are not impressed with the creative work that the AI cooks up. “Most of it’s just pulled off the advertiser’s website,” he said. “Google’s not creating; they’re reallocating.”
“Generative AI gets so many things wrong, and that [can] screw up your advertising,” added SEO strategist Mike Grehan. “And if I’m the advertiser, sorry, I’m not paying for that.”
But the generative AI in advertising isn’t yet a revenue driver for Google. The bigger issue revolves around trusting Performance Max, which determines where to serve ads to best effect. How does it work? That’s actually the issue.
“If you speak to advertisers, they all pretty much say the same thing,” said Schwartz. “Performance Max is a black box.”
“One of Vidhya’s biggest challenges is restoring advertiser trust,” said veteran branding and marketing consultant David Deal. “Google has alienated advertisers, who have a long list of grievances ranging from a lack of transparency to being strong-armed into adopting AI-powered campaign types. Google has a lot of work to do.”
Is Srinivasan concerned about the trust issues—in particular those surrounding AI?
“Very much,” she said.
Srinivasan said she’s in touch with advertisers several times a week in an effort to get them to be comfortable with the emerging technology. In addition, “we work on making sure the AI models themselves have guardrails in place in terms of what they can and cannot do,” she said. “We do adversarial testing of these models to find flaws. And on top of that, we want advertisers to remain in control. It’s a process of evolution and getting comfortable. That’s going to take some time.”
Never mind the boys
On the job seven months, Srinivasan still has some time to grow fully into her mammoth responsibility—but not forever, of course. Yet even when discussing the formidable tasks ahead, she never wavers in her confidence.
Srinivasan credits her grandmother for that.
Widowed at 40, Vatsala raised four daughters and put them through college. She also watched over a young Vidhya while her mother worked. Though Srinivasan grew up surrounded by boys, she reaped the benefits of “seeing a very strong woman leading the household and [making] big decisions.”
“It made it easier for me in my future life,” she said, ‘because I was comfortable in a predominantly male environment. The question: ‘Can women be strong?’ was not something I knew was a question.”