HN Reader

I’ve seen many small businesses do well on TikTok and Instagram by eschewing all fancy graphics and technology, and just talking into their phone’s camera like a normal person. “Hey I’m Joe, I just opened a cafe down here. It’s always been my dream, etc.” The more quirky and human the video, the better it does.

I know this new tool looks to be for static graphics; but I do think the same thing applies. Not using AI-generated polished graphics will become a differentiator.

This is depressing. We are already meat in the google ad-serving machine that tracks us, profiles us, gives us "free" stuff (gmail, anyone?) in order to feed us advertising.

Now even that advertising will be AI-generated. The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine, to be fed stuff paid for by advertisers and generated by machines.

Probably good for mom and pop shops, and super useful for someone who has a couple of restaurant locations or a few small grocery stores. I know a lot of places don't update their IG or whatever with specials for the week or basically anything because it's time and effort, if someone was running a campaign for a week of say a free side with a burger, but wanted to do a different side every day you could pick for free, you could churn stuff like that out super fast with this.

I tried it. I used it first for my stuff and thought wow I'd never use this for my stuff, but my stuff isn't a mom and pop burger joint with the kids working on weekend etc, I will show it to the lady who has the pho shop next door, maybe she will update her IG with her specials more often than "whenever I remember".

rip, and here i was hoping this was a fuzzer

2 min tl;dr video by Culture Kings (streetwear brand) founder

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/17L3FKCBbf/

Seeing a lot of "I'm an AI skeptic and <insert praise for new Google product>" highly upvoted in this thread.

The whole (original) premise of social media was "let's make a more human side of our business so that people can connect with us". Now we've come full circle where the robots are making all the social content and increasingly the robots are the ones consuming it too.

Weird, uncanny valley times. And, FWIW, not times I want anything to do with, hence why I've been off all social media for years now...

I'm so dead do all this generic hype lexicon: unlock, supercharge, revamp, disrupt etc, etc.

Suspicious-me is wondering how Google are going to treat AI generated marketing slop created using Pomelli differently to slop created with other tools (or even human created marketing content) in search ranking?

If I were an EvilGoogle manager, I'd have an enshittification playbook complete with a timeline and KPIs/OKRs mapped out - and probably already linked to individual engineer's promotion/RIF futures.

They know exactly who's using this tool and which company they're using it on behalf of.

In the short term I'd have those companies webpages using Pomelli generated content to rank highly, and for advertising on those pages to show higher then usual clickthrough rates - and probably gradually downrank non-Pomelli pages on their sites. Once it becomes well known that Pomelli generated content genuinely generates more revenue that other options (even though that's only because Google have their thumb on the scale), everybody is going to jump on the gravy train, and a sub-industry of Pomelli consultancies/agencies will show up, like specialist SEO firms did way back.

Gradually that new "Pomelli Content Optimisation" will capture a significant-enough slice of the web content generation pie, and Google will start to sell them "Pro" subscriptions and features, while at the same time reducing functionality and effectiveness of the tools individuals and end-user companies have access to - driving even more revenue into the PCO industry.

Eventually, when enough companies are fundamentally reliant on external PCO vendors, Google will ramp up the pricing of their tools.

(With any luck AGI will have turned us all into paperclips before that runbook plays out.)

Link goes to a page with a minimal hint and a video.

Their blog post has some detail: https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/pomelli/

Kagi said the "Key features and functionalities of Pomelli include:

    Content Generation: Pomelli can generate various marketing assets 
    such as social posts and ad creatives by analyzing
    a company's website to understand its brand identity
    
    Brand DNA: The tool builds a "Business DNA" from a company's 
    website to ensure generated content is consistent with the brand's identity

    Campaign Creation: It aims to generate entire on-brand marketing 
    campaigns with minimal user input

    Editable Assets: The generated campaign assets are editable

    Canva Alternative: Pomelli is positioned as a competitor
    to design tools like Canva"

On multiple levels; a snake eating its tail.

I didn't see anywhere on the page the date when they plan to kill the product...

Now google can sell you the AI that will design the ads for you that you will pay Google to serve. So nice of them.

Still waiting for the AI LLM based ad autobidder so that I can just plug a machine to Google and press the "give them all my money" button.

It really does not help me as a small business if Pomelli creates (shitty) AI content, but does not open the gates to actually reach people/customers.

From the article: "..like your social media, your site and your ads..."

I failed with my platform in the sense of online marketing. Although the platform itself did not fail, it has a solid user-base, but not enough reach to make a living from it.

Why did I fail from a marketing perspective? Because my social media, blog, ad words, etc. all do not have enough reach! The human made content itself is good and never was the problem. Reach it is!

This tool would not solve my problems.

Lots of startups are launching in this space. Creating ad copy and assets is obviously a hot idea.

I would love to hear what people’s takes on the market dynamics are, especially if any of the YC founders working in this space see this!

It's pretty bad. It generates mangled text and objects with bad proportions.

Dare I ask: who owns the IP to all the generated content? User? Google? Some complex arrangement governed by a 20-page ToS?

I am genuinely surprised that people still get excited about Google announcing new products/services given their track record. Unless it's core to its businesss model, this will probably get axed in a couple of years.

this will kill a bunch of startups.

> Pomelli by Google Labs is currently not available in your region.

xd

For an ad tech company, this is both on brand and pretty cool. I’m an AI skeptic and I support this.

Tried to run it a couple of times against our website and it failed every time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The company that is responsible for filling the Internet with junk is just going to help fill the Internet with even junk crap. Who would have thought about that?

I’ve been thinking long and hard about how AI could disrupt the field of ads creative, because a significant part of my income is tied to motion design applied to html5 banner campaigns for large companies in Europe.

What I see is that clients that invest in a campaign do not want to think about what an AI can produce. They don’t want to interact or brief an AI, they don’t want to do feedback rounds with an AI. They want a group of professionals that knows them to take over and do it all. If the professionals then use some AI for it, they mostly don’t care.

This is true so far for any campaign that allocates relevant funds (mid 5 figures and upwards). When it comes to the actual creation phase, right now AI is fundamentally immature and incapable of being controlled past the creation of static content.

All the motion and animation part for example is still somehow terra incognita for these tools. Take Adobe Animate, which is the go-to tool for anything 2D-animation, or Google Web Designer. Zero AI-features, simply because you can’t LLM frame by frame animations and have a result that is as precise as you need it. Or maybe you can, but for some reason these companies don’t see a business case for allocating resources to this specific development.

These tools can be great for smaller business that won’t have access to large campaigns, but as someone else mentioned, why do that when hiring a working gen-z social media native student will cost you slightly more, and possibly perform 100-times better with their native social media aesthetic?

Ps: Pomelli means door handles in Italian, and that’s… weird? Feels like a name randomly regurgitated by an LLM as well.

I'd rather spend $50 on Fiverr and get human generated content.

This is just going to breed mistrust, possibly end up hurting businesses. Generally speaking, there are two categories of marketing when it comes to the products I buy.

The first is the quality mass produced products like laptops, cereals, frozen pizzas, etc which have enough revenue that they can hire human marketing to come up with unique content, packaging and ads. The other category, is _high_ quality locally produced goods, like cheese, meats, and some clothing (for example) which do not have enough revenue to hire dedicated marketing staff, but instead use informal marketing. Marketing beyond simple ads in the later case barely matters since there is a lot of trust that the product is quality.

Now there are a lot of garbage products out there, mostly from dollar/discount shops, drop shippers, online shops, and sometimes supermarkets. Margins on these cheap products is usually thin, so if they can save a few bucks with Pomelli they will probably use it.

I'd argue that most people today have become very sensitive and well trained to sniff out poor quality products, its easy to get ripped off. Cues of poor quality could be the design of the packaging including language and fonts, the weight and feel of the product or the brand name when it comes to amazon products sold by Mosptnspg, DSPEAE , Sdarming or whatever lol.

Is the cue to poor quality not going to become Pomelli-style designs? People are already sensitizing themselves to genAI content, and Pomelli is unlikely to produce designs time after time again which are unique enough to bypass a good eye.

Everything about this, and I mean everything, makes me want to vomit.

I'm so glad we're all in this Faustian nightmare together, because as it all goes wrong we'll have a clear incentive to band together and help each other, right? Just like a lot of little Fausts would do.

Does anyone think the world is better with this in it?

[edit: there is a bug] where it doesn't render LaTeX from the scraped website when injecting it into the campaign materials..

Hot take from an AI skeptic: between this, Nano Banana and generative AI integrated into Gmail for repetitive emails, I’m starting to actually use Google’s AI for tasks I hate most.

Google appears to have their AI product game together!

“Pomelli is desktop only for now. Please switch to a computer to continue.” It would be nice if there was at least a screenshot for mobile users so they could determine if this was actually worth a second visit.

Just how many Gen ai products are they half assedly launching (in case of Google).