Omnicom Advertising and Google have unveiled the Middle East’s first AI-powered creative intelligence system, designed to analyze and optimize advertising before it runs.
The pilot, already live with UAE telecommunications leader du, marks the start of a planned rollout across Africa, the Middle East, and Turkey (AMET), with global expansion to follow.
The system combines Google’s ABCD framework with Omnicom’s proprietary AI, offering advertisers a unique tool to evaluate and enhance creative campaigns. Google’s ABCD detector assesses four key performance pillars: Attention, Branding, Connection, and Direction, measuring factors such as audience engagement in the first seconds, brand recall, emotional resonance, and call-to-action effectiveness.
Omnicom added its own AI layer, Brave Bot, which challenges creative work on distinctiveness, innovation, cultural relevance, and convention-breaking potential. By integrating the two systems, subjective creative debates are converted into actionable insights, such as tightening early seconds, adding brand mentions, or enhancing calls to action.
Real-world impact for clients
Telecommunications provider du was the first brand to use the system, with AI analysis covering 10 video assets. The tool identified gaps in brand presence, pacing, and emotional connection that human reviews had missed. Effectiveness scores ranged from 44 percent, highlighting major structural gaps, to 80 percent, indicating strong performance across all pillars. Crucially, the system provided creators with step-by-step guidance on how to improve each asset.
A third layer of the system incorporates regional cultural intelligence, helping teams align creative with local audience behaviors, preferences, and cultural norms.
Regional and global rollout plans
Following the du pilot, Omnicom Advertising plans to expand the system across its wider Middle East client portfolio in 2026. The rollout will then extend to the full AMET region, with a global deployment to follow, establishing the launch as a blueprint for AI-powered creative intelligence worldwide.
Omnicom is also exploring applications beyond YouTube, including social video, connected TV, and digital out-of-home advertising, positioning the system as a long-term tool for creative effectiveness across platforms.
“This is about further honing our creative instinct with the power of AI. It’s about giving our teams a creative partner that works alongside them to bring audience, culture, innovation, and platform insights in real time. When Google’s ABCD agent flags weak early attention, Brave Bot often flags the same moment as too safe or too familiar. The result is work that’s both effective and distinctive, optimized for performance and built to be remembered. We’re not using AI to make the work more automated. We’re using it to make the work more intentional, and to make sure every great idea delivers a great result.”
Aishi Lahiri, Director, Advertising Solutions, Google MENA, said that, “At Google, we’ve always believed that AI is a catalyst for creative effectiveness, especially when combined with human ingenuity. By taking our foundational ABCD AI detector and engineering their own proprietary cultural and creative layers on top of it, Omnicom is showing exactly how our regional partner ecosystem can innovate and drive impact using Google’s technology. This is a brilliant example of taking a core framework and customizing it to build campaigns that are culturally resonant and primed for performance on YouTube right from the source.”
