I’ve been testing a heap of Google’s experimental generative AI tools over the past few months with NZ businesses I work with. Most are forgettable, but five of them genuinely cut campaign production time in half - without needing extra people. All free, all worth knowing about.
1) Mixboard AI: Visual Concept Development
You type a natural language prompt and it generates mood boards with image creation, real-time variations, and visual workflow tracking. Great for quickly visualising concepts, getting stakeholder alignment, and keeping brand consistency while iterating faster.
2) Pomelli: Brand Intelligence & Campaign Generation
You give it your company URL, and in about 5 minutes it scrapes your brand assets - logos, colours, fonts, imagery - runs an audience analysis, and maps out your brand DNA. Then it proposes campaign concepts with creative materials. Basically skips the lengthy brand audit entirely.
3) Veo (Flow): Advanced Video Generation
This one does text-to-video, frame-to-frame sequencing, and has an “ingredients to video” mode for multi-asset integration. Upload brand imagery, product shots, and talent images to generate platform-optimised videos (portrait or landscape) with adjustable quality - quick prototypes or polished deliverables.
4) Whisk: Precision Image Composition
You get subject, scene, and style controls plus multi-image blending and real-time generation for consistent branded visuals. Combine products, ambassadors, and environments with natural-language prompts and aspect ratios tuned for your channels.
5) TextFX: Advanced Copy Development
It handles similes, word expansion, idea chaining, alliteration, acronyms, concept fusion, and phrase optimisation. Feed in existing copy and it spits out clearer, more compelling variants you can use across campaign assets.
How to Actually Use These
- Keep your marketing judgement in the loop for strategy and quality control.
- Use AI for acceleration, not replacement - test tool combinations systematically.
- Lock in brand guidelines so outputs stay on-brand.
- Take advantage of the zero cost to iterate and A/B test more concepts than you normally would.
The real win here is speed plus breadth of experimentation - faster time-to-market, more creative variants, and no extra payroll.
