WPP Pioneers Use Of Earth AI Models To Bridge Gap Between Digital Data And Physical Consumer Behaviour

Announced at Google Cloud Next ’26 on 22 April, it is one of the first media and marketing services companies to integrate Earth AI models and datasets.

This follows the announcement of the companies’ expanded Cloud and AI partnership in October 2025.

Bridging the gap

Currently, more than 80% of retail sales happen offline, according to research.

By bridging the gap between digital behaviour and the physical world, using Earth AI models and datasets, WPP is giving its clients the ability to anticipate consumer needs and understand, in real time, how the physical environment—factors such as traffic, weather, and neighbourhood movement patterns—shapes consumer behaviour and purchasing decisions.

Through this expanded partnership, WPP brands can now predict demand and automate marketing at a hyper-local level based on the pulse of the real world, shifting to proactive, tangible business solutions.

Using WPP’s Open Intelligence* for secure, privacy-first data collaboration, client data remains protected while yielding a deeper, more accurate understanding of consumer needs and behaviours.

People live in the physical world

"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," says Stephan Pretorius, chief technology officer at WPP.

"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," he adds.

Yael Maguire, VP and GM of Google Maps Platform and Google Earth, says that Google Earth AI brings together Google's decades of modelling the world, along with Gemini’s advanced reasoning, to help businesses gain much deeper insights into 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.”

Impact across three areas

This relationship will drive impact for WPP and clients across three key areas:

1. Advanced audience intelligence

   Through the integration of Population Dynamics Insights from Earth AI into WPP’s Open Intelligence, brands can now seamlessly connect how consumers buy products and perceive brands with real-world physical dynamics such as weather, community health trends or movement patterns based on aggregated, anonymised data.

   In the insurance sector, for example, clients can combine predictive weather modelling with WPP’s understanding of consumer behaviour, allowing companies to communicate ahead of time to consumers to ensure they are prepared, either by changing policies or acting to protect property and prevent claims from arising.

2. Predictive media planning and business outcomes

   Access to physical-world data with Earth AI datasets enables WPP to pre-validate campaign activations against highly accurate population metrics.

   This helps to shift media planning focus from traditional customer acquisition to tangible business outcomes.

   For example, WPP worked with a large multi-market automotive client to develop an “Electric Vehicle Readiness Index” for localities, using Google Maps Platform’s Places Insights data and Population Dynamics Insights, to understand the availability of chargers.

   This index informed the Designated Market Area (DMA) for media buys, achieving 77% higher performance relative to a standard DMA, with 15% lower cost to conversion.

3. Next-generation production workflows and solution development

   The partnership will also pioneer new maps-based production workflows, unlocking more innovative, granular localisation.

   Cultural Insights, a WPP Open product built with the help of Google Cloud, uses Google’s Places Insights and Maps Imagery Grounding to help client teams produce culturally contextual creative content grounded in real-world locations across 100 cities.

   With this solution, brands can 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, allowing brands to move from cultural foresight to production-ready, in-market creative at speed

Additionally, the integration of specialised data sets, such as Google Maps Platform's real-time Roads Management Insights, will directly bolster production and solution development, such as WPP-owned Satalia’s robust logistics business, powering advanced last-mile delivery and route optimisation for enterprise clients globally.