A client forwarded me an email from Google on Monday evening. Performance Max is getting an “asset optimization upgrade”, which in plain English means Google will use AI to stretch your video ads into the shapes you have not supplied yourself. Filmed in widescreen but never made a square version? Google will generate one for you.
If you would rather they didn't, you have until 4 September to fill in a form and ask them not to.
I have watched this sequence run enough times to recognise it before it finishes. It comes in three stages, and it is worth knowing which one you are standing in.
Stage one: encouragement
It starts gently. A suggestion in the interface, a line in a newsletter, a recommendation with a tick next to it. Add square video to your campaigns. Nothing is required of you and nothing happens if you ignore it.
This stage can run for a year or more. Most advertisers never notice it, because a suggestion that costs you nothing to ignore is a suggestion you ignore.
Stage two: alerts, and the grading
Then the tone changes.
Performance Max gives every group of your ads a rating: poor, average, good or excellent. It is called Ad Strength, and it sits in the interface where you cannot miss it. If you have not supplied video in every aspect ratio, your ads get marked as average.
Now, I have a client whose ads are marked average. Their campaigns return many times what they cost. The ads are fine. The only thing wrong with them is a missing shape.
But nobody wants to be average. That word does a great deal of work, and it is doing it on purpose. It is not a measurement of whether your advertising makes money; it is a measurement of how much of Google's inventory you have given them permission to fill. Those are very different things, and only one of them is your problem.
Google are quite open about this if you read their own documentation, where they describe “a correlation between increasing Ad Strength and performance”. Correlation is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence, and they chose the word carefully. It is not a claim that a better rating earns you more; it is an observation that accounts doing well tend to have more assets loaded. Which is true, and tells you nothing about whether adding a shape will help you.
This is where the psychological pressure gets applied, and it is applied with a straight face. A business owner logs in, sees “average” against their name, and goes looking for a reason to change something. That is the entire point of putting the word there.
Stage three: the mandate
And then it stops being a suggestion.
That is where we are with the video change. Google is not asking whether you would like AI-generated versions of your creative. Google is telling you it is happening, and offering you a form if you object.
Read that again, because the direction of travel is the interesting part. Encouragement became a grade. The grade became a nudge. The nudge has become a default, and the burden has quietly moved from them to you.
The bit that actually annoys me
There is an opt-out, and I will give Google credit for that; plenty of changes have arrived with no opt-out at all.
But look at what opting out involves. You have to notice the email. You have to log in. You have to find a form, complete it, and formally request that a company refrains from altering your own content. There is a deadline, and if you miss it, the answer is yes.
That should be the other way round. If a change is genuinely good for advertisers, let advertisers choose it. Make it opt-in and watch the take-up, because take-up would then tell you something true.
There is a second thing in Google's own help pages worth putting next to this. To reach the top Ad Strength rating, they advise you to upload your own video in horizontal, square and vertical, “rather than relying on auto-generated videos”. That is Google's advice, in writing, today. And the change arriving on 4 September auto-generates the very videos they have just told you not to rely on.
Both positions cannot be right. Either your own creative is better, in which case marking you down and then filling the gap yourself is an odd way to help; or the generated version is fine, in which case the advice needs updating. My guess is that nobody has noticed, because the two things were written by different teams with different targets, which is its own kind of answer.
The other thing worth saying out loud is why a lot of businesses have not supplied square video. It is not laziness and it is not ignorance. A multi-billion-dollar corporation with unlimited creative resource does not seem to grasp that a small or medium business has one person with a camera, a modest budget, and a list of things that matter more this month. Producing the same film in four aspect ratios is a real cost to them and no cost at all to Google.
So the grading marks a business down for a constraint it cannot easily fix, and then the platform fixes it for them whether they asked or not. I do not think that is unreasonable of Google as a commercial position. I think it is arrogant as a way of treating somebody else's brand.
To be fair to them, and I do mean this
The feature itself is probably fine.
For a great many advertisers, AI-extended video will be perfectly acceptable, and some will get more reach out of it than they would have managed on their own. If you are running a small account with one video and no way to make another, this genuinely helps you. I would not tell you to opt out on principle when the practical effect on you is positive.
My objection is to the default and the framing, not to the technology. Those are separable, and it is worth keeping them separate, because “Google did a thing I don't like” is not an argument.
What I would actually do
If you already have video in every aspect ratio, this changes nothing for you. The issue disappears on its own.
If you do not, and you care about how your brand looks, opt out before 4 September. The output may well be fine. But you will not have seen it before it runs, and that is a decision about your own creative that you have not made.
And if you are somewhere in the middle, ask yourself the honest question: is the reason you are considering this that it will help, or is it that something in the interface called you average?