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Google Labs, in partnership with Google DeepMind, has launched Pomelli, an artificial intelligence marketing tool designed to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) generate on-brand social media campaigns without requiring significant design expertise or budget. The tool which launched on 30 October as a public beta experiment in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in English.

Pomelli works in three steps: analyses a business’s website to create a “Business DNA” profile that extracts brand identity including tone of voice, custom fonts, images and colour palette; generates tailored campaign ideas specifically for that business; and creates high-quality, on-brand marketing assets designed for social media, websites and advertisements. Users maintain full control to edit text or images directly within the tool, and all assets can be downloaded for immediate use across channels.

The tool addresses what Google identifies as a major obstacle for SMBs including creating impactful, on-brand content that often requires significant investment in time, budget, and design expertise. Rather than starting from scratch or using generic templates, businesses can generate campaign materials that theoretically maintain visual and tonal consistency with their existing brand presence.

BTB So What?

Brand identity has always been the thing you couldn’t quite articulate but knew when you saw. The accumulation of choices, accidents, and taste that made your business feel like yours. Pomelli suggests that entire sensibility can be extracted, codified, and reproduced algorithmically. The question is whether that’s democratisation or homogenisation.

The case for the former is straightforward. For decades, brand consistency was a luxury reserved for businesses with agency budgets. Pomelli gives small restaurants, independent retailers, and local service providers access to cohesive brand presentation that was previously cost-prohibitive. That’s not trivial, it’s the difference between looking established and looking amateur, which directly affects customer trust. But there’s a tension in systematising creativity. When thousands of SMBs use the same tool to generate “unique” campaigns, they’re all being interpreted through the same algorithmic lens. The tool doesn’t create brands, it creates variations on patterns it’s been trained to recognise as effective. This could lead to a flattening of visual language where distinctiveness becomes algorithmic rather than authentic.

There’s also the apprenticeship problem. Junior creatives have traditionally learned by executing routine work through social media assets, brand guidelines, campaign iterations. If businesses can generate adequate output without entry-level hires, where does the next generation develop their skills? The counter-argument is that this frees creative professionals to focus on strategic work rather than execution, potentially elevating the profession.

The real tension: tools like Pomelli democratise professional-grade branding for millions who couldn’t afford it. But in doing so, they may standardise the very creativity they’re meant to amplify. Whether that produces a more equitable creative economy or simply a more uniform one depends on whether distinctiveness can survive systematisation, or whether authenticity itself becomes just another variable in the algorithm.