Sundogs rises to meet creative challenges at scale using Google Workspace with Gemini

“Since embracing Gemini, we’ve discovered how powerful it can be from an end-to-end creative perspective.” — Kim Snow, Executive Creative Director, Sundogs

Snapshot: Sundogs, a creative performance consultancy, serves a roster of global clients with a team of nine, requiring agile tools that empower collaboration across time zones and support productivity at scale. Learn how Google Workspace with Gemini has helped Sundogs:

• Collaborate with colleagues and clients anywhere at any time

• Unlock creativity at scale by embracing generative AI

• Fuse creativity, data, and AI to help brands make better ads

The mission and the challenge

What does an atmospheric phenomenon have to do with creativity, data, and AI?

At Sundogs, we believe that creativity, data, and AI are the three pillars of effective advertising. We’re named after the marvel known as a sundog — the illusion of two suns flanking our own, created by sunlight reflecting through ice crystals in the air — because we combine our expertise in these three areas to help our clients do their best work and make the most of the creative they put into market.

As a creative performance consultancy, Sundogs serves a global footprint for clients, from media and entertainment companies to global beauty brands. With a team of only nine people who are scattered around the world, you’d think collaboration on this scale would be a major challenge — but it’s not. This is how we use Google Workspace to collaborate with clients and colleagues in different time zones to build impactful campaigns together.

Using Google Workspace with Gemini

Sundogs has been using Google Workspace since our founding in 2023, and the platform is so embedded in our culture that it’s become a second language. We know exactly where to go for everything we need to do: We create pitch decks in Google Slides and copy docs in Google Docs, and we book client meetings and brainstorming sessions with Google Calendar and Google Meet. We don’t even think of these things as tools anymore — they’re simply how we work.

Beyond our internal collaboration, Workspace also helps us be more efficient with our clients by providing a centralized place for all our content. We constantly share files back and forth from Google Drive, whether that’s creative briefs or client data we need to interpret, and Workspace makes this process easy, organized, and secure. We can update access controls as needed to ensure only the right people can open certain files, and we can trust that Workspace protects our and our clients’ information at all times.

Since AI is at the core of our company, we were curious how Google Workspace with Gemini could support our creative processes. But as a writer by trade, I’ll admit I was skeptical about how AI could fit into my process. But now that we’ve brought Gemini into our workflows I understand that generative AI only enhances my creative output through brainstorming possibilities or even helping me finesse a draft to make it stronger.

Sometimes I even start by talking to Gemini about a topic to get my creative juices flowing. All creatives have been there: You have to create a 20-page pitch deck and you don’t know where to start to bring your ideas to life in a visual way. Gemini has accelerated this process, making it a valuable tool to scale our work and serve more clients with greater creative freedom.

For example, when Urban Decay, a brand born in the ʼ90s, wanted to rebrand for a modern audience, we used Gemini to help the team understand the difference between what was cool then and now. Before, it could take days to pull together these types of insights, but Gemini created a chart comparing audience behaviors in minutes. This gave Urban Decay insights on how to pivot their brand authentically while staying true to their core values.

Looking ahead

Our team is challenged every day to push the boundaries of what’s possible, so we need tools that help fuel the creative process. AI has always been central to our business, but since embracing Gemini, we’ve discovered how powerful it can be from an end-to-end advertising perspective.

We’re discovering new use cases for Gemini every day. The tool can help us analyze thousands of ads to find patterns in viewer attention and creative effectiveness, which empowers us to level up our ad game. It can quickly generate headlines, subheads, and other bits of copy that need to fit certain character counts, and it can shorten sentences while keeping them beautiful, meaningful, and alliterative. I also recently created a context-based thesaurus using Gemini Gems that goes beyond simple synonyms to provide alternate words that work within a specific context. I used to hesitate to lean into generative AI, but now we’ve gone all in. I can’t imagine how we’d do our work — at the scale we do it — without Gemini.