Google I/O and Google Marketing Live (GML) both landed this month, and they arrived with tons of new AI innovations. Between a new video model that lets you edit footage through conversation, a Universal Cart that turns Google into a checkout layer, and ChatGPT officially becoming accessible to more advertisers, May 2026 is one of the more active months in the space of AI in digital marketing. Here are the five most impactful stories for online advertisers.
Google Marketing Live 2026: Ads Move Inside the AI Conversation
Source: Google Blog | May 20, 2026
Google Marketing Live 2026 delivered on its framing: Gemini is no longer a layer on top of Google’s ad products; it is the operating system underneath all of them. The most consequential announcements for advertisers were a new generation of ad formats built for AI Mode and conversational search. Conversational Discovery ads and Highlighted Answers are now in U.S. testing on mobile and desktop, embedding ads directly into AI-generated search experiences rather than running alongside them. Business Agent for Leads, now in open beta for U.S. advertisers, puts a Gemini-powered chat agent inside your search ad. Instead of clicking through to a form or a landing page, a user researching a complex purchase can get product questions answered by your brand in real time from within the search result. Google also expanded its Direct Offers pilot with AI-generated bundles and native checkout. On the tooling side, Google launched Ask Advisor, a unified Gemini assistant that connects Google Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center, and the Google Marketing Platform into a single conversational interface for campaign planning and optimization. The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) was integrated into Demand Gen campaigns, YouTube Shopping, and AI Mode, with new Merchant Center “Conversational Attributes” designed to help products surface in AI-driven search.
| JumpFly Takeaway One line from the keynote has stayed with me: “The only way to win in the age of AI, is with AI.” I’ve been using AI tools across my work and personal life long enough to know that’s less of a slogan and more of a description of what’s already happening. Business Agent for Leads puts a Gemini-powered version of your brand inside the search result; the user never leaves to fill out a form. Conversational Discovery ads embed inside AI Mode responses. The ad isn’t running next to the answer anymore. It is the answer. The brands that start feeding quality inputs into Performance Max and AI Max now, and get in early on the new formats, are the ones who will have 12 months of learning data while everyone else is just getting started. I will be testing nearly every new format from GML. I want that advantage within AI Mode and AI Overviews, especially with Google expanding conversation search at Google I/O (larger text box, more AI-forward vs traditional search). |
OpenAI Opens Its Ad Platform: ChatGPT Is Now a Real Advertising Channel
Source: OpenAI | February 2026, expanding through May 2026
OpenAI officially began testing ads inside ChatGPT in February 2026, and the rollout has continued expanding through May with the launch of an Ads Manager platform that moves the channel from invite-only testing toward self-serve buying for a wider set of advertisers. OpenAI is targeting $2.5 billion in advertising revenue for 2026. Retail and consumer goods brands have dominated early inventory, with excluded categories including health, financial services, and political advertising. ChatGPT handles an estimated 50 million daily shopping queries, and the platform is the first major AI assistant to move from ad concept to a commercially available, self-serve ad product.
| JumpFly Takeaway ChatGPT has a massive user base; who does not want to advertise on such a large platform? As a marketer, this is a place that naturally makes sense for many, if not all, businesses to advertise on. You do need to apply and get approved (sometimes waiting up to a week to get approved; check those spam folders), and the limited interface is not overly exciting, but this will only improve and create more opportunity to expand revenue and/or leads. Approach it the way you’d approach any new channel, with a contained test budget and clear KPIs. Be an early adopter, start learning the platform, get ahead. The advertisers who have already run a few campaigns when the channel fully opens up will have a meaningful head start on everyone who waited to see how it played out. |
Google Launches Gemini Omni: Conversational Video Editing That Could Change How Advertisers Produce Creative
Source: Google Blog | May 19, 2026
Google introduced Gemini Omni at Google I/O 2026, a new model that can generate and edit video from any combination of inputs: text, images, audio, and existing video, using natural conversational language. The first model in the family, Gemini Omni Flash, is rolling out now to Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers through the Gemini app and Google Flow, and at no cost to users on YouTube Shorts and YouTube Create. The core capability that sets Omni apart from earlier video tools is multi-turn editing: Each instruction builds on the last, characters stay consistent across changes, and the scene retains context throughout the conversation. You can change the environment, add or remove elements, shift the visual style, or alter what’s happening in the video, all through natural language prompts, without going back to a production set. The model also brings improved physics reasoning, handling realistic movement, gravity, and fluid dynamics. All outputs carry Google’s SynthID watermark. API access for developers and enterprise customers is rolling out in the coming weeks.
| JumpFly Takeaway The specific capability worth paying attention to here is the multi-turn editing. Video ad creative has always had a production problem; once you’ve shot a spot, updating it for a new season, a new product variant, or a new market means going back to set or paying an editor. Omni changes that dramatically. The ability to type “change the background to a winter scene” or “swap the product color to red” and have the model carry that change through the clip consistently is genuinely new. Check out the videos; it is wild to see video editing made so simple.For advertisers managing high-volume creative across multiple SKUs or seasonal campaigns, this is a meaningful compression of production time and cost. But as we like to say over here, “Trust, but verify.” Don’t accept every output without checking it carefully, especially for brand consistency. But as a way to refresh existing creative quickly, test new seasonal variants before committing to a full production, or produce platform-specific cuts from a single hero asset, Gemini Omni is worth checking out today. |
Pinterest Posts Its Best Quarter in Years: AI Ad Tools Are Moving the Numbers
Source: LinkedIn News, CNBC | May 4, 2026
Pinterest reported Q1 2026 results that beat Wall Street estimates on every major metric, posting $1.01 billion in revenue, an 18% year-over-year increase that surpassed analyst projections of $966 million. Global monthly active users grew 11% to 631 million, and the company’s Q2 guidance also came in above expectations. The growth is being directly attributed to Pinterest’s investments in AI-powered ad targeting and performance tools, which have improved return on ad spend enough to pull incremental budget from advertisers who had previously treated the platform as an afterthought. The results come against real headwinds: Pinterest cut 15% of its workforce earlier this year, and activist investor Elliott Management took a $1 billion stake in the company. Against that backdrop, Q1 showed that AI-driven ad improvements are producing results measurable enough to change how advertisers allocate budget.
| JumpFly Takeaway Don’t sleep on Pinterest Ads. It’s a platform that JumpFly works with and has seen success on. An 18% revenue jump and 631 million monthly active users is not a platform in decline, it’s a platform that got its product right enough to start winning back advertiser confidence. But since I am focused on the AI spin of this, the specific driver worth paying attention to is the AI targeting improvement. Pinterest’s inventory has always had strong purchase intent baked in because users are actively planning purchases when they use it. Better AI targeting means better matching between that intent and the right ad at the right moment. If you’re in e-commerce, home, fashion, food, or any category where visual discovery drives decisions, Pinterest deserves a real performance test right now, not the leftover allocation it usually gets. Run it with proper conversion tracking, treat it like a performance channel, and see what the AI tools actually do to help with incremental growth. |
Google Launches a Universal Cart, and It Works Across Every Store at Once
Source: Google Blog | May 19, 2026
Google announced Universal Cart at Google I/O 2026, a single intelligent shopping cart that works across Search, Gemini, YouTube, Gmail, and other Google surfaces, letting shoppers browse and buy from multiple merchants in one transaction without leaving Google’s ecosystem. The cart is powered by Gemini models that actively surface deals, track price drops, and retrieve purchase history to help users make decisions. Checkout is built on the UCP. Payments run through a new Agent Payments Protocol with built-in spending limits and authorization controls. Merchants remain the merchant of record for every transaction. The cart is rolling out to U.S. shoppers this summer.
| JumpFly Takeaway I feel like Google tried this in the past, but this is different. You can buy from numerous stores in one view vs navigating to multiple sites to complete the purchase. That is the win that Google is trying to push. For advertisers and retailers, the implication is straightforward: if your products aren’t surfacing inside Google’s AI-powered discovery experience, you’re not in the cart. And the way products get surfaced is the same as it’s always been, feed quality. Gemini isn’t browsing your website to decide what to recommend. It’s reading your product data: titles, descriptions, pricing, availability, and merchant ratings. Even adding in the new “conversational attributes” will be important. The merchants who show up in this cart will be the ones whose data is clean, complete, and structured correctly in Merchant Center. I’ve said this before: The feed is that much more important in the age of AI. The robot is out shopping on behalf of the user, so clean data is imperative. This is why the JumpFly Feed Management service exists. A shopper who adds your product to the universal cart doesn’t need to go to your website, compare alternatives, or reconsider at checkout; that can happen conversationally now. Adopting UCP is important to allow your products to be purchased via the Universal Cart. These concepts are all new to everyone navigating the ongoing changes with AI. I encourage you to learn about this and adopt what might be the new future. |
Looking Ahead
The shift happening across May’s stories is the same one: AI is moving from “just a chat” to the transaction layer itself. Google is becoming a checkout surface. ChatGPT is a real media buy. Pinterest’s AI tools are moving ROAS numbers. Gemini Omni is compressing video production timelines that used to take weeks. We’ve been positioning our team and our clients to be AI-ready and AI-fluent, not because it sounds good, but because the gap between the advertisers who are and the ones who aren’t is widening faster than most people realize.
Questions about how these trends affect your campaigns? Let’s talk.
