Last Thursday (22 May) Google Marketing Live EMEA broadcast from Dublin. The content was basically the same as the global keynote in Mountain View two days earlier, just localised for European advertisers. AI was the heaviest theme by some distance. Google also took the opportunity to retire the Power Pair name from last year and introduce the Power Pack, which is what the keynote spent most of its time on. The other big theme was YouTube, which Google is pushing hard as a buying surface now that Shoppable CTV and creator campaigns are properly bookable from Google Ads.
Past the framing slides, here are the announcements worth caring about.
Search, AI Overviews and Google Lens Updates
Debbie Weinstein, President of Google EMEA, framed the day around how complex consumer behaviour has become. People stream, scroll, shop and search at the same time, often without a clear funnel between the four. Her argument was that Google and YouTube remain the only platforms sitting across all of those behaviours at scale.
The figures Google was leaning on:
- Search now sees over 5 trillion queries a year, with Gen Z the heaviest searchers per day
- AI Overviews have reached 1.5 billion monthly users across more than 200 countries
- Google Lens has handled over 100 billion visual searches so far in 2025, with Google reporting that one in five Lens searches now shows commercial intent
- YouTube records more than 1 billion hours of viewing on TV every day
- YouTube Shorts now reaches more than 2 billion monthly users across all surfaces, with viewing time on TV specifically more than doubled year-on-year
- YouTube viewers watch over 90 million hours of shopping videos daily
The implication for advertisers is that the search box, the camera and the TV are converging into a single discovery surface, and Google’s ad formats are being rebuilt to reflect that.
Try It On and AI Shopping
Worth noting that the shopping piece getting the most coverage at GML EMEA wasn’t strictly a GML announcement. Try It On launched at Google I/O on 20 May, two days before the EMEA event, and rolled into Google Search Labs in the US that same day. The feature uses generative AI to let shoppers upload a full-length photo of themselves and see how items from product listings actually fit. International markets started rolling through later in the year.
Behind it sits Google’s Shopping Graph, which now covers more than 50 billion product listings, refreshed at a rate of over 2 billion updates an hour. For retailers in fashion, footwear and beauty, this is the most concrete signal yet that visual try-on is moving from novelty to default expectation in online shopping.
The Power Pack: PMax, AI Max and Demand Gen
The keynote retired the “Power Pair” branding from GML 2024 and replaced it with the Power Pack: Performance Max, the new AI Max for Search campaigns, and Demand Gen, presented as the three core campaign types Google wants advertisers running together.
Performance Max. Google rolled out more than 90 quality and back-end improvements to PMax through 2024, which it says lifted conversions and conversion value by more than 10% on average without any work required from advertisers. The bigger news is channel performance reporting, now in open beta, which finally breaks PMax out by surface so advertisers can see exactly how YouTube, Search, Display, Gmail and Maps are each contributing. The “black box” complaint about PMax has been one of the loudest from agencies for two years, and this is the first meaningful response to it.
AI Max for Search Campaigns. A one-click upgrade to existing Search campaigns that adds broad match, keywordless matching and AI-driven creative on top of the existing setup, while leaving the controls you need to steer it. Google’s internal data puts the typical uplift at 14% more conversions or conversion value at similar CPA or ROAS. For accounts still mainly running exact and phrase match, the typical uplift is reported at 27%. The beta started rolling out in Google Ads from late May, with Search Ads 360 following at the end of Q2.
Smart Bidding Exploration. A bidding update designed to find conversions in search queries your existing campaigns would not have bid on, using flexible ROAS targets to allow the algorithm more room to test. Now globally available in beta.
Demand Gen. Google reports over 60 improvements in the past year, with a year-on-year conversion uplift of 26%. New prospecting controls are coming, building on Google’s argument that a meaningful share of Demand Gen conversions come from users who hadn’t seen the brand’s Search ads in the previous month.
The YouTube Ad Updates Worth Knowing About
If anything got proper airtime in the keynote, it was YouTube. A few specific updates worth flagging:
- Shoppable Connected TV ads rolling out globally over the quarter
- More Shorts inventory opening up to advertisers. Google spent time making the case that Shorts is mature enough to plan media against directly, rather than treating it as the short-form cousin of regular YouTube ads
- Creator Partnerships Hub: working with YouTube creators is now done from a single section in Google Ads, where previously the workflow was scattered across two or three different tools
Google’s pitch was straightforward enough. YouTube isn’t just a top-funnel video buy anymore, not with Shorts pulling in two billion users, Shoppable CTV ads going live globally and creator campaigns becoming bookable directly from Google Ads. Whether that pitch lands depends on your sector. For some, YouTube as a full-funnel platform is still a stretch. For shopping advertisers especially, though, it’s worth a serious look at running test budgets into formats that didn’t exist this time last year.
App Campaigns and iOS Improvements
App marketers got two updates worth knowing about:
- Target ROAS bidding on iOS is now available, with Google reporting a 22% increase in ROAS among advertisers using it
- On-device conversion measurement for iOS app campaigns is rolling out, which improves the picture Google has of post-install behaviour without breaking Apple’s privacy framework
For anyone running iOS app campaigns where measurement has been thin since IDFA changed, this is the most useful pair of updates of the year.
What to Do With This
If I were sitting down to a planning conversation off the back of GML EMEA, three things would lead it:
- The Power Pack isn’t really a new product; it’s the rebranding of where Google wants budget to sit. Test AI Max on a Search campaign and use the beta of PMax channel reporting to actually see what’s happening inside your existing PMax spend.
- Shopping advertisers should be thinking about how their feeds and product imagery will perform inside Try It On and visual AI search, not just in conventional Shopping ads.
- YouTube has earned a second look. Shoppable CTV, the Creator Partnerships Hub and Shorts inventory together close enough of the gap with the platforms YouTube used to lose to that it’s worth running a test budget into the format that fits your audience.
Google’s message all day was that AI isn’t going to wait for advertisers to be ready for it. That’s true in the sense that the campaign types will keep moving towards more automation regardless. It’s less true in the sense that doing nothing is still an option for now. The more useful question is which of these updates are worth investing learning time into this quarter and which you can revisit in six months.