Google Is Quietly Building a Free Marketing Suite
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
A professional product shoot used to cost somewhere between $500 and $3,000. Studio rental, photographer, lighting setup, post-production, back-and-forth on edits. For a small business selling handmade jewelry or artisanal coffee, that’s a high barrier to entry.
Google just made it free.
Photoshoot is a new feature inside Pomelli, Google’s AI marketing tool that launched five months ago through Google Labs. Upload a product photo (even a phone snapshot!), pick a template like “Golden Hour” or “Minimalist Studio,” and the tool handles lighting, background, composition, and formatting for platforms like Instagram or Facebook. You can refine with natural language (”change my background to a forest”), restyle one image to match another’s look, and download or save the result for future campaigns. It’s available now, for free, in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
But the feature that deserves attention isn’t the image generation itself, rather what Pomelli calls Business DNA — a profile built from your brand’s colors, fonts, visual style, and product context. When Photoshoot generates an image, it automatically applies your brand’s aesthetics. That’s not “AI makes a pretty picture.” That’s “AI makes a pretty picture that looks like it came from your brand, every time, without a brief.” Consistency at scale has always been one of the most expensive problems in marketing. Agencies charge for it. Brand guidelines exist because of it. This makes it default and free.
What makes this worth watching — even if you’re not running a small candle business — is the pace. Pomelli launched in October as a basic campaign generator. By January, Google added Animate through Veo integration. Now Photoshoot. They’ve also quietly improved the campaign workflow: you can now paste a product URL and Pomelli will pull images, titles, and descriptions from your site to generate ad creatives grounded in your actual inventory. In five months, this went from “interesting experiment” to a tool that handles brand identity, product photography, video, and campaign creation in a single free platform.
Google is assembling a full-stack marketing suite inside Labs, and the iteration speed is aggressive. If this is what the free tier looks like in February, it tells you something about where baseline expectations are heading by December.
Of course, Photoshoot is not going to produce the campaign that wins your team any awards. AI-generated product imagery, no matter how polished, converges to the mean. Competent, clean, professional, and utterly safe. There’s no creative director’s instinct in the loop, no happy accident in the lighting, no art direction that makes someone stop scrolling and feel something.
But the mean is exactly where the vast majority of current marketing output is, for a reason. Not every asset is a hero campaign. Most of your visual output — the product pages, the social posts, the seasonal refreshes, the A/B test variants — just needs to be good, on-brand, and fast. Even at large organizations, 80% of creative production is functional, not inspired.
If a free tool can handle that 80% and free up your team’s time and budget for the 20% that actually requires a human point of view, that’s a win.
— Torsten and Peter
3 AI Marketing Tools To Try Today
Eleven Labs
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InVideo
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Notta
Transcribe and summarize meetings in real-time—Notta captures conversations, generates action items, and creates searchable transcripts so you never miss critical details.
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This is a great example of how Limber Locals will use agentic tools for Cre(AI)tivity. Here's a Substack article that Randall Rothenberg and I wrote about the personas shaping the Cre(AI)tive Economy. https://winningexperience.substack.com/p/meet-the-personas-building-the-creaitive