Solving "Analyze and Reason on Multimodal Data with Gemini: Challenge Lab" — A Complete Guide

Multimodal AI is no longer a futuristic concept — it's a practical tool that can analyze text reviews, product images, and podcast audio in a single workflow. In this post, I walk through the GSP524 Challenge Lab from Google Cloud Skills Boost, where we use the Gemini 2.5 Flash model on Vertex AI to extract actionable marketing insights from three different data modalities for a fictional brand called Cymbal Direct . If you're preparing for this lab or want to understand how multimodal prompting with Gemini actually works in practice, this guide covers every task with the reasoning behind each solution. The Scenario Cymbal Direct has just launched a new line of athletic apparel. Our job is to analyze social media engagement across three channels: Text — Customer reviews and social media posts (sentiment, themes, product mentions). Images — Influencer and customer photos (style trends, visual messaging, target audience). Audio — A podcast interview with a Cymbal Direct representative (s