Google Learns to Love

Google quietly launched Pomelli last Tuesday. Canva unveiled Canva Grow on Thursday. Two launches, 48 hours apart, that most analysts missed the strategic significance of: one of agencies' three core defences against platform disintermediation just weakened substantially.

As platforms have systematically automated media buying and creative optimisation over the past three years, agencies built their defensive positioning around three arguments:

Defence #1: Platform Agnosticism. "You'll be encouraged to overinvest in one platform. You need an agnostic partner to balance spend across Meta, Google, Amazon and others, and maintain leverage in negotiations."

Defence #2: First-Party Data Ownership. "We help you build proprietary customer knowledge and identity graphs. Platforms want you dependent on their walled gardens, we help you own the relationship."

Defence #3: Brand Stewardship. "Platforms optimise for the next conversion event. They don't love, or even respect, your brand. They won't protect brand equity or strategic positioning. We will."

All three defences carry legitimacy. Platforms do create spend pressure toward their own inventory. They do benefit when advertisers lack independent identity infrastructure. And they have historically treated brand as irrelevant to the optimisation function.

But last week, Google and Canva began systematically dismantling Defence #3.

Mark Zuckerberg articulated Meta's philosophy with striking clarity in his May 2025 interview with Ben Thompson on Stratechery: "You're a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting demographic, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out."

At Stripe Sessions, he elaborated: "We're gonna be able to come up with, like, 4,000 different versions of your creative and just test them and figure out which one works best."

Translation: Give us your product and budget. We'll generate thousands of variations, test them algorithmically, surface whatever drives conversions. Brand guidelines? Creative integrity? Visual consistency? None of that factors into the optimisation function.

This philosophy validates Defence #3 completely. Performance Max and Advantage+ treat brands as conversion machines. They optimise for the click, the add-to-cart, the purchase, but they have no concept of brand equity preservation. A creative variant that converts 3% better but completely violates your visual identity? The algorithm surfaces it.

For direct response marketing, this works brilliantly. For performance campaigns where brand is irrelevant and you're optimising for immediate ROAS, Meta's approach delivers superior results at lower cost.

But for premium brands, B2B enterprises, or anyone where perception drives pricing power, Meta's vision represents an existential threat disguised as efficiency.

This is why Defence #3 has been so effective. CMOs look at Meta's black-box optimisation and say: "I'm not willing to sacrifice brand control for 15% better performance metrics. I need partners who understand that not every high-converting creative should run just because it converts."

Last week's Pomelli launch suggests Google recognised this ceiling on platform penetration.

Pomelli (Google Labs experiment, launched October 29) doesn't start with Zuckerberg's "connect your bank account" mechanistic approach. It starts with "give us your website URL."

The AI analyses your site to build what Google calls "Business DNA” for your tone of voice, colour palette, typography, visual style, image aesthetics. Then it generates campaign ideas and creative assets that respect those brand elements before optimising for performance.

The sequencing matters fundamentally: Brand understanding → Creative generation → Performance optimisation.

Not: Performance optimisation → Whatever creative converts best.

Canva Grow (launched October 30, part of their new Creative Operating System) follows the same principle.

The system scans your website and existing brand materials to understand your identity, builds a comprehensive Brand Kit, then generates marketing assets that maintain consistency while optimising for results. You create in Canva using your brand guidelines, publish directly to Meta (more platforms coming), track performance in real-time, and iterate, all while the system enforces brand coherence.

Kristine Segrist, Canva's global head of brand and product marketing, described it as creating "a closed-loop system that's always on." But unlike Meta's closed loop that optimises purely for conversion, Canva's loop includes brand consistency as a core constraint, not an afterthought.

Canva now serves 95% of the Fortune 500 and generates $3.5 billion in annual revenue. This isn't speculative technology, it’s a $42 billion company that's already rebuilt creative infrastructure for how businesses design, now extending that into the full marketing workflow.

Platform disintermediation version 1.0 failed to fully penetrate enterprise marketing precisely because it couldn't credibly address Defence #3. Performance Max could deliver better ROAS, but at the cost of brand control. That trade-off worked for performance marketers and SMBs but was unacceptable for brands where equity drives premium pricing.

Google appears to have studied this carefully. Pomelli isn't replacing Performance Max, it’s addressing the brand marketer objection that prevented P-Max from capturing the premium segment.

The strategic integration question becomes critical: What happens when Google unites Pomelli's brand intelligence with Performance Max's media optimisation and Veo's video generation capability? Now that’s when it gets really interesting.

Google has demonstrated the patience, capital, and technical capability to execute multi-year platform strategies. They're not announcing vaporware, they’re working systematically through the constraints that prevented platforms from replacing agencies for sophisticated marketers.

Pomelli is in Labs (experimental phase). But Google Labs is where they test concepts before integration into core products. The trajectory is clear.

Meta's mechanistic vision of "give us budget and product, we'll optimise everything else”, validated every agency concern about platform disintermediation. It proved that platforms treated brand as irrelevant noise in the optimisation function.

Google's Pomelli and Canva Grow represent something more sophisticated: platforms acknowledging that "trust our black box" isn't sufficient for brand marketers. They're building brand understanding and respect directly into the platform capability.

This is a tipping point of platforms becoming more systematically sophisticated about what human brand stewards have been protecting.

The first generation of platform automation threatened tactical agencies and performance shops. This second generation threatens the philosophical narrative that strategic agencies built their defence around.

When platforms not only match agency performance but do so while respecting brand guidelines, the value calculation fundamentally shifts. Not because platforms are perfect as they're demonstrably not. But because they've addressed the core objection that kept premium brands paying agency retainers despite superior platform performance metrics.

Defence #3 hasn't disappeared entirely. But it's weakened substantially. Agencies that relied primarily on "we protect your brand" as their value proposition face strategic pressure to articulate more specific, less platform-replicable value.

The agencies that navigate this evolution successfully won't be those denying it's happening. They'll be those clearly articulating brand stewardship capabilities that sophisticated platforms cannot replicate, even when platforms learn to respect brand identity systematically.

For marketing leaders managing platform relationships, agency partnerships, and brand evolution simultaneously, this changes planning assumptions significantly. The question isn't "can platforms handle performance while agencies protect brand?" anymore.

The question is: "What specific brand judgment and stewardship requires human insight that platforms cannot extract from our digital presence and historical performance?"

That's a considerably harder question to answer with confidence.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 5 November 2025 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.