WPP bridges the gap between digital marketing and physical reality with unique 'Google Earth AI' integration

LAS VEGAS, April 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Cloud Next '26 -- Following the expansion of its Cloud and AI partnership with Google in October 2025, WPP has become one of the first media and marketing services companies to integrate Earth AI models and datasets – Google's planetary-scale geospatial intelligence – directly into WPP Open, its agentic marketing platform.

Currently, more than 80% of retail sales happen offline, according to research. By bridging the gap between digital behaviour and the physical world, using Earth AI models and datasets, WPP is giving its clients the ability to anticipate consumer needs and understand in real-time how the physical environment—factors such as traffic, weather and neighbourhood movement patterns—are shaping consumer behaviour and purchasing decisions.

Through this expanded partnership, WPP brands can now predict demand and automate marketing at a hyper-local level based on the pulse of the real world, shifting to proactive, tangible business solutions. Using WPP's Open Intelligence* for secure, privacy-first data collaboration, client data remains protected while yielding a deeper, more accurate understanding of consumer needs and behaviours.

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, 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."

This relationship will drive impact for WPP and clients across three key areas:

• Advanced Audience Intelligence: Through the integration of Population Dynamics Insights from Earth AI into WPP's Open Intelligence, brands can now seamlessly connect how consumers buy products and perceive brands with real-world physical dynamics such as weather or movement patterns based on aggregated, anonymised data. In the insurance sector, for example, clients can combine predictive weather modeling with WPP's understanding of consumer behaviour, allowing companies to communicate ahead of time to consumers to ensure they are prepared, either changing policies or acting to protect property and prevent claims from arising. 
  
  
• Predictive Media Planning and Business Outcomes: Access to physical-world data with Earth AI datasets enables WPP to pre-validate campaign activations against highly accurate population metrics. This helps to shift media planning focus from traditional customer acquisition to tangible business outcomes. For example, WPP worked with a large multi-market automotive client to develop an "Electric Vehicle Readiness Index" for localities, using Google Maps Platform's Places Insights data and Population Dynamics Insights, to understand the availability of chargers. This index informed the Designated Market Area (DMA) for media buys, achieving 77% higher performance relative to a standard DMA, with 15% lower cost to conversion.
  
  
• Next-Generation Production workflows and Solution Development: The partnership will also pioneer new maps-based production workflows, unlocking more innovative, granular localisation. Cultural Insights, a WPP Open product built with the help of Google Cloud, uses Google's Places Insights and Maps Imagery Grounding to help client teams produce culturally contextual creative content grounded in real-world locations across 100 cities. With this solution, brands can identify emerging cultural trends at a city level, then generate in-market imagery and video that reflects the aesthetic and narrative codes of each market, allowing brands to move from cultural foresight to production-ready, in-market creative at speed.

Additionally, the integration of specialised data sets, such as Google Maps Platform's real-time Roads Management Insights, will directly bolster production and solution development such as WPP-owned Satalia's robust logistics business, powering advanced last-mile delivery and route optimisation for enterprise clients globally.

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

About Google Cloud
Google Cloud offers a powerful, optimized AI stack—including AI infrastructure, leading models like Gemini, data management capabilities, multicloud security solutions, developer tools and platform, as well as agents and applications—that enables organizations to transform their business for the Agentic Era. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

Editorial notes

*WPP's Open Intelligence: Open Intelligence is WPP's foundational intelligence layer, transforming live signals from clients, partners and WPP into predictive intelligence that drives growth. Built on InfoSum's data collaboration technology, it unlocks actionable insights without data ever being shared – enabling brands to act on real-world behaviour in real time while preserving privacy, control, and trust.

SOURCE Google Cloud