Google Spent Three Years Saying Trust PMax. Now They Are Handing the Controls Back.

Google spent the last three years telling PMax advertisers to trust the algorithm. Hand over your assets, set a budget, let the machine figure out where to show what. Now they're quietly adding features that do the exact opposite: giving advertisers more granular creative control inside the campaigns they were told not to touch.

The latest example is Asset Group Theming, a new feature first spotted by Google Ads specialist Bia Camargo and reported by Search Engine Land. It lets you clone an existing PMax asset group, apply a seasonal or promotional theme, and let Google's AI generate themed image variations and copy suggestions. Your original asset group stays untouched. The themed version runs alongside it.

On the surface, this is a time-saving feature for seasonal campaigns. Underneath, it's another signal that Google's full-automation bet on PMax hit a ceiling, and they need human creative direction to close the performance gap.

How theming actually works (and what it doesn't do)

The workflow is straightforward. You select a high-performing asset group inside a PMax campaign, clone it, and choose a theme from Google's library. The option shows up as "Apply theme to existing asset group" when you're creating a new one, or as a prompt within the Asset Groups tab ahead of major holidays.

Google then takes your existing images as a base and adds themed backgrounds. It also suggests headlines and descriptions that match the chosen theme. The available themes cover three categories:

• Promotional: Sale, Studio/Editorial
• Seasonal: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall
• Cultural Moments: Christmas, Black Friday/Cyber Monday, Halloween, Valentine's Day, Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Hanukkah, New Year, Lunar New Year, Back to School

That's 21 theme options total. A decent library for the first version.

But there are real limitations worth knowing before you get too excited. This does not create entirely new creative concepts. It adds themed backgrounds to your existing images. It doesn't touch video assets at all. It typically updates only a handful of headlines to match the theme, not all of them. Everything generated needs manual review and editing before it goes live. Think of it as a starting draft, not a finished campaign.

The pattern behind the feature matters more than the feature itself

PMax launched in 2021 as Google's most automated campaign type. The pitch was simple: give us your assets and your budget, and we'll figure out the rest. No manual bidding. No channel selection. No placement control. For a while, that was genuinely the direction Google was moving. Every update in 2022 and 2023 removed a control or consolidated a manual option.

Then something shifted. Look at what Google has added to PMax in 2025 and 2026:

• First-party audience exclusions (so you can stop targeting existing customers)
• Channel-level asset reporting (so you can see which networks your assets actually run on)
• Budget reporting within campaigns
• Audience demographic breakdowns
• Network placement segmentation
• Asset-level A/B testing (beta, January 2026)
• And now, Asset Group Theming for creative control

Each of these gives the advertiser more visibility into what the algorithm is doing, or more ability to direct it. That's the opposite trajectory from where PMax started. Google isn't saying this out loud, but the product roadmap says it clearly enough: full automation without human input underperforms relative to automation with human guardrails.

I think this is the more important story than the theming feature itself. Google is acknowledging, through shipping decisions if not press releases, that the "trust the machine" approach needed more nuance than they initially sold it with.

Where theming actually saves real time

Seasonal creative refreshes have been one of the most tedious parts of PMax campaign management. If you run an e-commerce account, you know the drill. Black Friday requires themed creative. Christmas requires different themed creative. Valentine's Day, Easter, Back to School, each one means designing new assets, rebuilding asset groups, and watching performance dip during the transition because the algorithm has to relearn with new inputs.

The clone-and-theme approach sidesteps the riskiest part of that process. Your proven asset group keeps running. The themed variant runs alongside it. If the themed version performs better for seasonal traffic, great. If not, you haven't broken anything.

Combined with the asset-level A/B testing beta from January, this creates a genuinely useful workflow: clone your best asset group, apply a seasonal theme, run both versions simultaneously, and get controlled performance data on whether themed creative actually lifts results for your specific account. That's a test most PMax advertisers couldn't easily run six months ago.

The teams managing multiple seasonal peaks across the year (retail, travel, education) will get the biggest time savings. If you're running a B2B SaaS campaign with no seasonal variation, this probably doesn't move the needle much for you.

The video gap is a real limitation

One thing that jumped out when I looked at the feature more closely: theming doesn't apply to video assets at all. Given that YouTube, Discovery, and Gmail placements within PMax all lean heavily on video, this is a meaningful gap. You can have a beautifully themed image set running alongside completely un-themed video creative, which creates a visual inconsistency that could actually hurt performance if users see both in the same session.

Google Ads Editor 2.12, which launched in the same month, raised the maximum videos per asset group to 15 and added 9:16 portrait image support. So Google is clearly investing in PMax creative tooling more broadly. But the theming feature doesn't integrate with the expanded video capacity yet. I'd expect that to come in a future update, but for now, themed campaigns with mixed asset types will feel a bit lopsided.

The real test for your account

If you run PMax campaigns with any seasonal component, the practical next step is simple. Pick your best-performing asset group. Clone it. Apply the theme for your next upcoming seasonal moment. Let both run and compare performance over 14 days. The clone-and-compare workflow combined with channel-level reporting means you can see not just whether themed creative helps overall, but which specific channels (Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps) it helps on.

I wouldn't treat the AI-generated themes as final creative. Review every headline, check every image for awkward compositing, and make sure the themed backgrounds don't clash with your brand guidelines. Google's AI is generating a starting point. Your designer still needs to sign off on the final version.

The broader signal here is worth sitting with, though. Google built PMax to be hands-off. Now they're building features that assume hands-on creative direction from advertisers. If you took the early pitch literally and stopped paying attention to your PMax creative, this is probably a good moment to go back in and see what the algorithm has been doing with the assets you gave it. The controls to actually steer it are finally starting to appear.

By Notice Me Senpai Editorial