Empowering the next creative frontier with AI research

Collaboration spans generative media, geospatial intelligence and agentic AI – with new solutions already deployed for clients including Duracell.

WPP and Google Cloud have invested heavily in a frontier research initiative, pairing product innovation with scaled solution development to transform the marketing industry. Building on the company’s new Cloud and AI partnership announced late 2025, this research arm unites functions across Google to reimagine the consumer journey, from audience intelligence, to creative and content production to measurement.

This partnership enables WPP and Google Cloud to demonstrate that the next phase of AI empowering creatives will be defined by research depth and human creativity. This vision is part of a much larger partnership that integrates research workstreams into WPP’s creative and media processes.

Supporting proof points across the partnership

  • Generative media for global campaigns: WPP and Google DeepMind collaborated to solve a unique creative challenge: seamlessly lip-syncing the iconic Duracell Bunny for a global football campaign. By combining Google DeepMind’s advanced Generative Media models with expert AI research, the teams developed a new animation solution for the experiment. This technology breakthrough adapted the Bunny’s specific mouth movements and expressions for multiple languages, keeping the character perfectly on brand without generative artefacts. The technology unlocks a new creative canvas for real-time, culturally relevant storytelling at global scale.
  • Autonomous marketing intelligence: WPP Research teams have harnessed AlphaEvolve – a Gemini-powered agentic framework – to autonomously propose, evaluate and refine predictive model architectures for marketing campaign intelligence. Applied to WPP's own intelligence pipelines, teams achieved up to a 10% improvement in prediction accuracy and a 7% increase in recommendation scores over highly competitive baselines, in a fraction of the time required by traditional manual experimentation.
  • Real-time environmental intelligence: by integrating population-level intelligence and real-time environmental data – including live weather, air quality and neighbourhood movement patterns – into WPP Open, WPP has developed new frameworks for audience intelligence, predictive measurement and creative production. Brands can now trigger dynamically personalised, hyper-local campaigns; pre-validate media planning against highly accurate population metrics; and scale deeply contextual creative that reflects the exact place and moment of the consumer.
  • Predictive cultural forecasting: developed jointly with Google Cloud, the Cultural Intelligence Engine is a multimodal, geospatial predictive AI system that extracts early social signals from public content, clusters them into distinct cultural codes, and forecasts their diffusion across 50 cities and 50 categories. The platform translates predictive cultural insights into actionable opportunities and rapid creative seed packs, enabling brands to act ahead of emerging cultural shifts.

Marco Montanaro, Marketing Director, Duracell, said: "At Duracell, we're always looking for partners who share our appetite for pushing the boundaries of creativity. This collaboration with WPP and Google DeepMind delivered exactly that. It was a pioneering approach that allowed our Bunny to engage authentically across languages and markets during a major sporting moment. Innovation wasn't just part of this project, it was the common thread from start to finish.”

Giuliana Coli, VP, Strategic Partnerships, WPP, said: "We believe the next phase of AI-driven creativity will be defined by by placing the human creative at the centre of the process. By collaborating with Google on frontier research to embed directly into our creative and media processes, we're giving our people and our clients capabilities a distinct competitive advantage in the industry."

Eleni Shaw, Principal Lead, Google DeepMind, said: "Working with WPP gives us something rare - The ability to see frontier research meet real creative challenges for our partners. That feedback loop between research and application is what accelerates both sides.”

Further Information

WPP Communicationspress@wpp.com

About WPP

WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands. We unite cutting-edge media intelligence and data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production, transformative enterprise solutions and expert strategic counsel in a single company – powered by exceptional talent and our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, to help our clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth. For more information, visit wpp.com.

Google DeepMind Credits for Duracell Research Project:

Principal Lead: Eleni ShawLeads: Andeep Toor, Hakan Erdogan, Vivek Kumar, Tom HumeProject Collaborators: Ian McGraw, Pawel Wluka, Gregory Shaw, Vivek Kwatra, John Isidoro, Sungmin Bae, Maria Abi Raad, and the wider Google DeepMind team.Special thanks to Douglas Eck and Eli Collins.