AI, data, and the power of human creativity shaped this year’s conversations at the 2025 Google Partner Summit

Last week, we had the wonderful opportunity of attending the 2025 Google Partner Summit. Rene Wielenga, Peak Ace’s Head of Performance Advertising (SEA), joined forces with our French counterparts, Rodolphe de Myttenaere, Head of Paid Media, PA France, and Robin Basset, Directeur SEA, PA France.

Each year, we’re blown away by the drive, intellect, and dedication of all our fellow partners and the inspiring speakers in attendance. This year was no exception.  The summit was brimming with AI insights, behavioural science perspectives, and data-driven strategies that will undoubtedly shape the next chapter of digital marketing. Here are our top highlights and reflections.

The Human Edge in an AI-Driven World

Nathalie Nahai – Behavioural Science Advisor & Host of The Hive Podcast – emphasised the invaluable role of human creativity and meaning-making in digital marketing. While AI continues to transform the industry, she reminded us that automation should support creativity, not replace it.

Instead of letting AI steer us, Nahai advocates for a model where we embed our distinctive voices, emotional nuance, and lived experience into AI-assisted work – creating a truly human-centred approach to technology.

She raised an important caution:

• When ideation or drafting is handed entirely to AI, output certainly accelerates – but we risk diluting the unique flavour that comes from human insight and cultural context.

• AI might produce a compelling headline or image pairing, yet it lacks the emotional depth and brand memory that your audience subconsciously connects with.

• AI doesn’t (yet) hold moral or ethical judgement in the way humans do. Overreliance on automation could undermine human agency – the ability to reflect, steer, and make deliberate creative choices rather than merely accepting algorithmic suggestions.

• Left unchecked, this could lead to a creative blur – a world where outputs start to look and sound alike because the same AI systems are producing everyone’s work, eroding distinctiveness.

In practice, this means using AI to scale performance marketing – think paid social, PPC, or programmatic campaigns – while reserving the final voice, tone, and brand story for human creative judgement.

Nahai’s vision for a hybrid model struck a chord: one that delivers both speed and scale through AI, yet retains authenticity and uniqueness through human insight. The message was clear – let AI do the heavy lifting, but let people do the meaning-making.

Building Data Strength for Smarter Marketing

Andrea Clausen – Head of Data & Measurement CE & EEM, EMEA Hub, Google – shifted focus from creativity to measurement, offering a compelling perspective on data confidence and marketing ROI.

According to Clausen, true confidence in marketing doesn’t come from dashboards or vanity metrics. It comes from what she calls Data Strength – a robust, privacy-safe, and high-quality data foundation that allows AI to generate insights rather than noise.

But what does that look like in practice? Clausen broke it down with clarity: building Data Strength means consolidating cross-channel signals into a single, privacy-compliant data layer. Once that foundation is in place, AI can start uncovering relationships between actions and outcomes – pinpointing where ad spend drives genuine incremental value, not just surface-level engagement.

She outlined a continuous operating model – Plan, Optimise, Prove – that marketers can use to operationalise this mindset:

• Plan: Define measurable business outcomes and build data pipelines capable of feeding both predictive models and experimentation frameworks.

• Optimise: Deploy AI to dynamically adjust bids, budgets, and creative combinations as performance signals evolve.

• Prove: Close the loop with rigorous measurement that ties marketing activity directly to incremental business results.

Clausen also underlined how this model gains strength through tight feedback loops between incrementality tests, marketing mix models (MMMs), and attribution systems:

• Incrementality tests provide causal truth – they reveal lift that platform metrics often miss.

• Attribution models, especially data-driven attribution, scale those causal signals to inform real-time optimisation.

• MMMs zoom out, connecting these insights to top-line growth and validating performance over longer periods and economic cycles.

When connected, these three frameworks create a learning system:

• Incrementality informs attribution calibration.

• Attribution refines short-term automation.

• MMMs confirm that optimisation aligns with genuine business growth, not just proxy KPIs.

Clausen’s perspective reframed measurement as a growth discipline rather than a reporting task. Marketers who invest in AI-ready data ecosystems and maintain tight feedback loops between experimentation and modelling can not only prove impact with credibility but also optimise with confidence.

Here’s to Another Year of Partnership!

We’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to the teams at Google for inviting us once again and for their continued collaboration and support. Every year, the Partner Summit impresses us with its flawless organisation, its passion-fuelled sessions, and its celebration of innovation across the industry.

Having had such an inspiring and energising experience, we’re already looking forward to seeing what next year’s summit will bring!