Google Pomelli brings film grade AI to product marketing

The models Google built for film and video work are now shooting product photos. Pomelli, an experimental marketing tool from Google Labs and DeepMind, went viral in February when its Photoshoot feature launched and the announcement pulled 23 million views on X in a few days. The Pikes blog ran a hands on review of pomelli product photography to test what the hype actually delivers, and the short answer is more than most photographers would like.

Film tech under the hood

Photoshoot runs on Nano Banana, the image model Google has been folding into its visual products, and the Animate feature added in January runs on Veo 3.1. that is the video model serious studios have been watching all year. The pipeline takes a phone snap of a product, rebuilds it as studio or lifestyle imagery, then animates the result into a short ad with one click.

The buisness DNA trick

Pomelli starts by reading your website. It builds what Google calls a Business DNA profile from your colors, fonts and tone of voice, then generates campaigns that match your brand instead of a generic template look. Anyone who has graded footage to match a brand book will recognize how much manual work that step replaces.

Photographers are not thrilled

PetaPixel greeted the launch with a headline about hammering nails into the coffin of photography, which tells you how the industry read it. The economics are hard to argue with. A product shoot that cost a few thousand dollars now happens in a browser tab for free. The same argument played out in film with virtual production, and the honest answer is the same too. The floor disappears while the top end survives.

Free while the beta lasts

Pomelli is free in public beta with no card and no usage cap, and in March Google expanded it from four countries to over 170. A Product Catalog feature landed this year as well, the third major addition since launch. Google is clearly feeding its film grade models into every visual job it can find, and product marketing just happens to be the first one where the output is already good enough to use.