Episode 373: Pomelli Photoshoot - Turn 1 Photo into a Full Campaign

Actually, let's go back and take a look at our campaigns and see if our animated campaign has generated. Sure enough, it has. Let's see what this looks like. Wow, I am actually super impressed, you guys.

It's animated our little character in our image here, and it's done a really good job of it. If you're not watching along on video, we have our little AI marketing navigator from one of the old, I think the original thumbnail for the podcast. And we have our little navigator slash space explorer here. And it did a very, very good job making him just like look up over his shoulder.

Looks like he's talking. So the campaign feature is definitely really cool. And animate them, those campaigns to give them a little extra flair. I think this animation worked really well in this case.

And I kind of wish that I had some different copy here. And I'm going to have to work with this one a little bit because it looks really nice. Okay, let's jump back to our photo shoot, see what's going on there. Welcome to the AI Marketing Navigator, where we simplify AI marketing to keep you ahead of the curve.

brought to you by Digital Pop, delivering AI marketing automation so your small business thrives. Here's your host, Alex Carlson. What is up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the AI Marketing Navigator.

This is your daily compass in the ever-evolving world of AI marketing. Okay, Navigators, we are back today talking about another tool that is making another career obsolete in the AI space. This tool is from Google Labs. It is called Pomelli, and we're specifically talking about their new feature called Photoshoot.

So first, a little bit of an introduction on Google Labs itself. You can think of Google Labs as basically a public incubator for all of the most ambitious and experimental AI projects that Google is working on. Basically the stuff that they're not quite ready to push out and make official yet, so they want to call it an experiment in Labs. It's a platform where users can get a first look at these tools and most importantly, offer feedback, criticism to the Google development teams.

Basically, the idea is to just solidify these projects or products and make them impactful for users before rolling them out into official tools. And the Google Labs initiative is built on three primary pillars. The ones that we're going to be talking about today are the experiments. That's the kind of the core thing that makes up the Google Labs, all of these different products.

That's what Pomelli is, one of these Google Labs experiments. We'll talk about that. But we also have learning lab sessions, which are experimental collaborations. And then you have a community as well, forming a pillar of Google Labs, a community of AI enthusiasts who help guide the development process, basically.

So you can think of it as experiments, lab sessions, and the community around Google Labs. And this actually started way back in 2002. It was when everything went crazy on the AI front recently that it really kind of relaunched into public knowledge, especially AI public knowledge. and has become a leader in the AI tool space for sure.

Okay, moving on now to the reason for our episode, and that is Pomeli. Pomeli is basically an AI-powered marketing assistant. Think of it like a social media marketing assistant almost. It helps you generate campaign ideas very, very adherent to your brand, which is very important.

And you can think of it as an assistant to small to medium-sized businesses or even solo entrepreneurs. It's one of the most, I think, significant projects to emerge from Google Labs. It's very useful. Its original purpose was to create, again, scaled on brand social media campaigns.

It was originally launched in 2025. So it's pretty new as far as experimental or excuse me, Google labs go. It involves three steps. The first is building a business DNA.

This is basically your brand. It essentially builds your brand identity. And we're going to walk through each of these steps with you at the end of the episode here. And then after that, it takes your brand and it generates tailored campaign ideas and it creates these high quality branded marketing assets that you can use across your campaigns.

And you can do some really cool stuff with which we'll talk about it's really meant to be kind of a starting point a jumping-off point a brainstorm partner for marketing efforts especially brand aligned marketing efforts okay now that pomelli that Google labs now that brings us to to Photoshoot which is the most recent and arguably the most disruptive addition to Palmelli And this was launched back on the 19th of February, so just a few days ago. And it's a tool that's powered by Google's Nano Banana, the image generation model.

And in my opinion, and in most people's opinion, the leading image generation model. And what you can do is you take a single basic product photo and at the click of a button, you can transform it into a variety of professional studio quality marketing images. Again, with just a few clicks, it's allowing you to do what basically a professional photo shoot would do in a matter of seconds without any of the insane investment or expertise. Simply upload a product image or provide a product URL, choose from a selection of templates like studio or lifestyle or in use, or there's some for in-home or consumables or specifically style and fashion or beauty, for instance.

So select your template and again, click a button, you generate a range of on-brand visuals ready for use in social media or in ads or even on e-commerce platforms for businesses if you're an e-commerce business. So the implications of photoshoot are pretty profound if you think about it, especially if you work in the industry, whether that's e-commerce and you have a bunch of products that you're constantly trying to update photos for, or if you work for an agency that does professional product photography, you know that the cost can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars per product and per photoshoot.

And this is a huge financial barrier for many solo entrepreneurs out there, many small to medium sized businesses as well. So photo shoot has just entirely reduced that barrier. And this is just more democratization of high quality, creative capabilities and intelligence. We've been talking about that since the beginning of the show.

And we see again, the leveling of a playing field when it comes to product photography here with Palmeli. And there are other tools that do similar things to Palmeli. We've talked about them on the show. But if you are a smaller shop, or if you run an e-commerce store and you're looking for updated product images and you want them in bulk and price has been a blocker for you, that is no longer the case.

Now, of course, we are already hearing from the photography community that this is a direct threat to their livelihood. And of course, it is. AI is pretty much a direct threat to most anybody in the knowledge works. And now in a lot of the creative industries, livelihood, more so still in the knowledge industry for sure, but more and more so the creative industry as well.

According to some reports from the UK Association of Photographers, 58% of its members have already lost work to generative AI. Now the counter arguments, as there always are, are that with all this AI generated content and with the AI slop out there, if it can in fact be differentiated, there will be that much greater appreciation for the authentic human creative photography and creative in general. This is where there needs to be though some pretty robust and clear requirements for AI generated images or art, if they need to be watermarked or stamped or whatever it might be, this is where that becomes imperative.

And I don't know if or how that gets enforced, but that's a pretty key aspect here. Okay, before we wrap up and hop into Pomelli and see what it's all about and do a little photo shoot demo, let's just quickly run through all the other Google Labs, the other projects that they have, starting with Project Genie, which is really incredible, probably worthy of an episode of its own. But this is their new world builder or world generator. You type in a prompt, you give it an image and it generates a 3D explorable world for you.

And I think you can explore it for like a certain time limit or something, some sort of distance range or something like that. It's really incredible. They have Flow, which is a filmmaking tool. They call it a filmmaking tool because it uses the VL3 model.

But the idea is it allows you to create clips and scenes that are highly consistent. So multiple scenes, multiple clips with a high degree of consistency, which is really the challenge with these AI video generators. Of course, you have Notebook LM. We've talked about that multiple times on the show, the viral learning assistant that allows you to take text, URLs, videos, whatever it might be, PDFs and import it into your tool.

And essentially we teach you in a variety of different channels or methods all about that topic subject or content You have Stitch which is an AI power design tool It can turn simple prompts or images into integrated UI designs and front end code We I think we touched on that one shortly or briefly in an episode about Google Labs, but it might be time to go back and check out Stitch as well. Of course, it's competing against the replets and the lovables and all that of the world and now cloud code.

So Stitch has a long way to go. But of course, Gemini has anti-gravity, which is well, anti-gravity is their IDE, I should say. But Gemini has its coding capabilities as well. And they have a command line tool just like Cloud Code that you can use in the terminal.

Not to go off on a technical tangent here. But anyway, lastly, you have WISC, an image generation tool that uses images as prompts. So you basically provide an image and you can guide that creation process by providing visual references for the subject, for the subject to scene or the style of the image. Now, of course, we have Photoshoot and Palmeli, the newest, latest Google Labs tool.

And Google Labs continues to offer a glimpse into the potential future of simplified AI creativity. Very simplified, very user-friendly AI creativity. Okay, with that, let's go ahead and hop over into Palmeli Photoshoot. Here we are looking at the Palmeli dashboard.

So again, when you first get this set up, you're going to generate your business DNA. And it's going to walk you through getting some campaign ideas and then generate some creatives for you. So let's just go through this together. you can see exactly how it looks when you set up your pomelli account or your setup here.

Let's start by giving it our website, thedigitalpop.com. And it's going to analyze that for us. And it's going to take about 10 minutes according to the helper here.

Okay, and it has our business DNA. It did a pretty good job. It grabbed all the correct colors. It grabbed a few images from the website and from our podcast and things like that.

no font or anything like that it doesn't have a logo for us so let's go ahead and add those things really quickly stand by while I get those added because I'm just a perfectionist I want to see exactly what it will look like with our results if we get the correct logo and things in here stand by okay that looks pretty good we have our poppins font in here now we have our little icon that we're going to use for our logo let's go ahead and proceed and it's generating some campaigns for us and we are going to try the new photo shoot feature obviously in a second but we have our campaigns here let's take a look at those your 24 7 virtual marketing department these look pretty good except it is pulling in some podcast imagery into our campaigns here so we would have had to provide some different images i think to get these to work right but you can see that you know all in all if if the images were correct the formats look nice and they look like they might be usable and you can animate them automatically here let's animate this one see what that looks like we'll give that a few minutes to generate here but this is the idea you can very quickly and very easily with your brand in mind, generate some campaign ideas and use them.

And depending on how this animate feature turns out, I think that would be a pretty cool little perk. But let's go into photoshoot. We'll come back to that generation here. But as you can see, it walks you right through here.

You can create a product photoshoot or you can generate or edit an image. You have two options right out of the gate. I already have an image that we are going to use. We created a funny little zero pack, the future of backpacks when we were doing some product marketing and product marketing AI demonstrations a while back on this show with our zero pack, the zero gravity backpack.

So we're going to use that and do a product photo shoot with it. Let's just go ahead and select an image like so. And we have some templates that it's going to allow us to select from. And then we can select our aspect ratio as well, whether we want it in story, square, or for a feed.

Let's just do story format for now. a flat lay or a model try on, in use, Easter. If you're not watching a long end video, these are the photo shoot templates. We have a flat lay, it looks like it's just the product itself on like a white background, but you can have a model try it on.

You can have a model using it. They have an Easter template with Easter coming up here as well So let jump into our photo shoot templates and it automatically selected the four that it showed us there at the beginning The model try on in use flat lay and Easter And then with Easter you can change the holiday here which is pretty cool as well So we just leave it as Easter right now. Our purple backpack, if you saw our image, it's very bright purple. I don't think it's going to look too good with an Easter theme, but we'll see what they do here for Easter with our campaigns.

But you have a lot of different templates here. The different categories include beauty or general or consumables for like beverages or home for home goods. So a few different options and each of those has multiple different kind of shots in it for your product. But let's go ahead and proceed with the four that we have selected and create our photo shoot.

And this is going to take about two to three minutes it says. So we'll jump ahead for your sake here as well. Actually let's go back and take a look at our campaigns and see if our animated campaign has generated. Sure enough it has.

Let's see what this looks like. Wow I am actually super impressed you guys. It's animated our little character in our image here and it's done a really good job of it um if you're if you're not watching along on video we have our little ai marketing navigator from one of the old i think the original thumbnail for the podcast and we have our little navigator slash space explorer here and it did a very very good job making him just like look up over his shoulder looks like he's talking so the campaign feature definitely really cool and animate them those campaigns to give them a little extra flair.

I think this animation worked really well in this case and I kind of wish that I had some different copy here and I'm gonna have to work with this one a little bit because it looks really nice. Okay let's jump back to our photo shoot see what's going on there and here we go we have our photo shoot. It gave us the four different themes we were looking for and it did a pretty interesting one for Easter year I have to say. The flat lay it's on like some very futuristic background which is cool and then it shows a model wearing our zero g or zero grab backpack and I have to say doesn't look quite as stylish as i had imagined with the uh with all the stuff sticking up off them but i'll let you guys decide and and hey if it's zero gravity it might just uh be worth it for somebody to look as silly as it does in this image and then with your generations you can create a campaign or you can add them to your business dna so if you generate something that you really like or if you think is a really good fit to your brand or your business dna you can just add them automatically right here or you can download them looks like you can edit them as well let's just hop in see what editing them is like uh describe the edit you would like to make so i'm assuming this is using nano banana pro to do the edit so let's say we wanted to change the backpack to um like a pastel easter edition or something like that and it's going to take a couple minutes to do that but i am impressed by the results and here we have our pastel easter edition backpack it did a really good job actually I'm impressed.

We have a little bunny icon. We have a little Easter chick attachment to our backpack here. So that would very quickly and very easily easily fit into our our Easter themed photo shoot. So this tool is simple, but I think it's incredibly useful for not only, of course, the photo shoot feature, creating multiple photo shoots or shots of your product, but just for campaigns and building out ideas and very quickly and easily iterating on your brand, just a ton of value in the Palmelli tool.

So definitely check out Palmelli by Google labs. Okay, that does it for today's episode. If you enjoyed the show or found it useful in any way, please do me a favor and follow on Spotify or subscribe on your podcast platform of choice. It is by far the most helpful thing you can do for the show.

Also, if you're watching on YouTube, make sure to hit that subscribe button and turn on all notifications so you get notified each day. So you get notified each time that we drop an episode until then. And as always, thank you so much for joining me and remember to stay curious, stay consistent and keep navigating forward. Bye.

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