WPP is integrating Google Earth AI into its agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, in a bid to bridge digital behaviour and the physical world.
Using the tech giant’s geospatial intelligence Earth AI models, including Google Maps, WPP is hoping to help clients anticipate consumer needs and understand how the physical environment is shaping consumer behaviour and purchasing decisions in real time.
This includes factors such as traffic, weather and neighbourhood movement patterns.
Announced today (22 April) at Google Cloud Next 2026 conference in Las Vegas, the Google Earth integration follows WPP’s $400m partnership with Google Cloud, announced in October, in a bid to catch up with competitors, WPP chief executive Cindy Rose said at the time.
Publicis Groupe followed in April with a new “strategic partnership” with Microsoft, under which the two companies will “leverage each other’s expertise to embed agentic AI” throughout the marketing workflow and beyond.
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.”
Google Earth AI and WPP’s partnership aims to help clients in three main ways. Integrated with WPP Open Intelligence, which is built on InfoSum’s data collaboration, clients can understand how consumer behaviour is impacted by physical dynamics such as weather. For example, insurance companies can use predictive weather modelling to communicate to consumers ahead of time about changing policies or acting to protect property.
Physical data from Earth AI can help WPP with predictive media planning based on population metrics. For example, WPP using Google Maps to understand the availability of chargers for an automotive client.
Paired with WPP Open’s Cultural Insights products, the Earth AI partnership aims to provide more granular localisation, helping brands 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.
Yael Maguire, vice-president and general manager of Google Maps Platform and Google Earth, said: "Google Earth AI brings together our decades of modelling 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."
Source: Campaign UK
