WPP integrates Google Earth AI into marketing platform

WPP has integrated Google Earth AI models and datasets into its WPP Open marketing platform, making it one of the first media and marketing services groups to use the geospatial tools in this way.

The move expands WPP's broader cloud and artificial intelligence partnership with Google by bringing Google's geospatial intelligence into WPP Open, the platform it uses for clients.

The integration is designed to connect digital marketing data with signals from the physical world, including traffic, weather and neighbourhood movement patterns. WPP expects this to help clients assess demand and adjust marketing activity at a local level.

The strategy reflects the continued importance of physical retail, with WPP citing research showing that more than 80% of retail sales still take place offline.

Three areas

WPP plans to apply the new setup across audience analysis, media planning and production. In each area, it aims to combine its own consumer and campaign data with Google's location-based datasets.

For audience analysis, WPP will use Population Dynamics Insights from Earth AI within its Open Intelligence layer. This could allow brands to connect consumer purchasing and brand perceptions with physical conditions such as weather and movement patterns, using aggregated and anonymised data.

One example is insurance, where clients could combine weather modelling with WPP's consumer data to reach people before severe conditions hit, with messages about policy changes or steps to protect property.

Media planning is another focus. WPP said adding physical-world data would allow campaigns to be tested against population metrics before launch, with the aim of improving business results rather than focusing only on customer acquisition.

It pointed to work for a multi-market automotive client, where it created an "Electric Vehicle Readiness Index" for local areas. According to WPP, the index used Google Maps Platform Places Insights data and Population Dynamics Insights to assess charger availability, helping define the Designated Market Area for media buying. That resulted in 77% higher performance than a standard DMA and a 15% lower cost to conversion.

Local content

The partnership also covers production workflows tied to maps and location data. WPP said its Cultural Insights product, built with Google Cloud, uses Places Insights and Maps Imagery Grounding to help teams produce localised creative work based on real-world locations across 100 cities.

The product is intended to identify cultural trends at city level and support the production of imagery and video tailored to local settings. WPP said the same approach could help brands move more quickly from trend analysis to market-specific creative materials.

Specialised datasets are also being introduced into other parts of the group. Real-time Roads Management Insights from Google Maps Platform will support work at Satalia, WPP's technology business, in areas including last-mile delivery and route optimisation for clients.

WPP said the data collaboration element would run through Open Intelligence, which is built on InfoSum technology. The framework is designed to keep client data protected while allowing it to be used to generate predictive insight.

Stephan Pretorius, chief technology officer at WPP, said: "Google Earth AI brings together a whole universe of datasets representing the physical world into a single foundation model that for the first time, allows us to make decisions in an entirely new way. As an industry, we have had access to enormous amounts of digital data to understand human dynamics, trends and what content people consume. But people don't just live in the digital world-they live in the physical world. By integrating this foundational physical-world data with our marketing data, we are changing the way the marketing industry thinks about consumer journeys."

Yael Maguire, VP and GM of Google Maps Platform and Google Earth at Google, said: "Google Earth AI brings together our decades of modeling the world, along with Gemini's advanced reasoning, to help businesses achieve much deeper insights about the planet. WPP is using Earth AI datasets in novel ways that can transform industries, and we're proud to help drive impact for their clients."