Gemini Social — Malvika Menon

An AI-enabled social media program built for speed, scale, and success

Project Ignite, Google Gemini

The Challenge

The AI race is on, and it’s playing out in real time on social media.

To gain an advantage in APAC, the world’s fastest growing digital region, Google wanted to use its country-level social media handles to start building a more locally relevant presence for Gemini. Sounds simple, but in fact, winning in APAC comes with multiple challenges:

Local vs Regional

Local markets autonomously ran their own social media handles and till date, no regional level social media programme had ever succeeded in breaking through.
APAC Complexity

APAC is a complex region, with work in each market requiring local insights and nuance. Simply translating and adapting global assets wasn’t an option.
Volume of Assets

Winning in social takes both quality & quantity. Creating localised assets for 7 different markets, with the aim of at least 1 post per week was daunting.
Pace of Change

Gemini is evolving rapidly, with new product launches becoming an almost weekly occurrence. Keeping pace required an agility the org didn’t yet have.
Org Complexity

In organizations as big and complex as Google, creative assets often have to go through multiple approvers and endless feedback loops which cause delays.
Challenger Mindset

For the first time in a long time, Google was the challenger brand. ChatGPT had already claimed a larger share of voice in APAC, and wasn’t slowing down.

The Solution: Project Ignite

A radical new AI-enabled social media workflow that reduced creative asset delivery time down from 1 month to just 1 week.

The guiding principle of Project Ignite was prioritizing speed & efficiency, without compromising creative quality & local relevance.

Working hand-in-hand with the Google Gemini product marketing team, every week would follow a process of rapid strategy and ideation, same-day approvals (or troubleshooting and revisions), followed by storyboarding, market opt-ins, and finally creative production—all within the span of a week. At every step of the process, custom designed AI tools enabled the team to move at speed, while delivering high quality creative output.

This was a groundbreaking new approach for the team at Google, who were used to working with agencies that took weeks to deliver a single video asset. Here, we were delivering 5-6 localised assets every week, and continuing to learn, iterate and uplevel our creatives with every one.

Examples of the Work

80% original concepts. 20% adaptations. 100% locally relevant.

When the project first started, it relied on mostly adapting global concepts for a quick turnaround. But slowly that changed, and after a year, the team is now delivering roughly 80% original local concepts, and 20% adaptations. Below are a few examples of localised assets, designed specifically for the needs of APAC. Markets like India and Indonesia lean towards more humour or nostalgia driven creative, while Japan and Korea prefer more “cutesy”, aesthetically designed creative.

One of the biggest wins for the programme was when the global creative team requested to post global versions of APAC’s assets on the global Google Gemini handle. The 2 assets below were created by our team in APAC and posted as global assets.

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A post shared by Google Gemini app (@googlegemini)

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A post shared by Google India (@googleindia)

The Results

In the first year, we built 500+ assets across 7 markets, and tackled 38 different product launches.
Regional EMEA and LATAM teams, and even the Global Google Gemini team have all reached out for APAC assets to use on their own social handles.
Project Ignite is cited internally as a benchmark for social media models, with other regional teams now trying to emulate it for their own markets.