The Click Brief - July 2025

In this exciting inaugural podcast episode of The Click Brief, hosts Jeremy Packee and Emily Anderson dive into the latest digital advertising and Martech updates from July 2025.

In this exciting inaugural podcast episode of The Click Brief, hosts Jeremy Packee and Emily Anderson dive into the latest digital advertising and Martech updates from July 2025. They kick things off with a deep dive into OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Agent, an advanced tool that can browse the web, use APIs, and automate multi-step tasks.

The hosts explore its potential to save time and make work more efficient, sharing their personal experiences with grocery shopping and campaign management using the tool. Next, they discuss Google’s AI-powered shopping upgrades, including virtual try-ons for apparel, smarter price alerts, and outfit inspiration. Emily emphasizes the need for e-commerce businesses to get their product feeds in top shape to stay ahead of the curve. As they move on to Instagram’s new partnership with Google, the hosts highlight the value of SEO for social content, encouraging businesses to optimize captions and hashtags for better visibility.

The episode continues with exciting updates from Google Ads, including the launch of localized forecasts in Keyword Planner, Meta’s new ad performance breakdowns, and the rollout of asset-level metrics for responsive search ads. The hosts reflect on the need for caution when using AI-driven features and the importance of strategic decision-making in campaigns. Closing out the episode, Jeremy and Emily discuss Google’s Smart Bidding Exploration, a new feature aimed at optimizing ROAS with more flexible bidding. They share their thoughts on the potential impact for e-commerce brands, while acknowledging that further testing is needed to fully understand its effectiveness. Tune in for all the insights and takeaways to keep your digital advertising strategies on the cutting edge!

Episode Transcript

Jeremy: Hey there, and welcome to the July 2025 first ever podcast edition of the Click Brief with me, Jeremy Packee.

Emily: And Emily.

Jeremy: This roundup highlights the biggest digital advertising and Martech updates announced in July. Here are the updates and what we want to talk about. And for anything we didn’t talk about, you’ll find that in the blog post. Let’s dive in with the high impact updates. Openai introduced ChatGPT Agent, a new mode that can browse the web with a visual browser, use a terminal and APIs, log in where you approve, and complete multi-step tasks end-to-end like research, building slides or sheets, and pulling data from connected apps. It starts rolling out to Pro, Plus, and team now with enterprise and education to follow.

Emily: Yeah, I’m not going to lie, this blew my mind when I first saw it. Obviously, Obviously, AI getting better and better. I think we heard recently from an MKEDMC that you have to think of this AI being the worst AI you’re ever going to use. And I thought immediately about that with the agent. I first immediately went to test out the grocery store pickup feature where I could tell it, Hey, make me a menu for the week, and then go to this grocery store and order my groceries. So then I just have to pick it up. And as I was using it, it was awesome. Obviously, you’re watching it almost control your mouse, and then you can take over at any point. It has you take over to enter your credit card information and so forth. But as I was using it, I was like, I need this to be 20% better. Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy: Is that tool built in? Is it a grocery tab that you can just- No, it was just a separate folder I made for my weekly groceries.

Emily: So then I had it compile me a list of the ingredients I needed, told it, Okay, here’s what I already have, which is basically nothing. My kitchen is bare bones. I’m not a big… It’s either full or empty. Yeah, exactly. So I’m like, Yeah, you’re probably going to need to get all these. But it’s cool. You’re going in. If you don’t know where it is, if you’re not familiar, you’re opening up ChatGPT. You do need the paid version.

Jeremy: Yeah. Is that the pro?

Emily: Yeah, It’s going to be the pro. So this did get me to personally upgrade.

Jeremy: I had to upgrade right away as soon as I found out about ChatGPT.

Emily: It’s pretty cool. So I recommend it. It’s going to save ultimately the time of the grunt work in the future. Obviously, that’s a personal use example, but I do think We both have been experimenting with ChatGPT over the years.

Jeremy: Oh, yeah. We use it all the time and test it. It’s not always perfect. I think what Emily said, I think you said this, at least before you said, this is the worst AI you’re ever going to use. It’s already pretty good. For the grunt work, it does already do a great job, auditing some campaigns, interacting with it with structure. But as far as the actual agent part of it, I haven’t tested it that much. What gets me excited about it is, we already talked about the grunt work, but things like, I build this campaign the same time every week for this promo. I wonder, is it good enough now to be able to do that? I haven’t tested this feature yet, but that’s what I’m excited about.

Emily: That’s cool. I haven’t even thought about really how I can use it too much for work. One thing I think would be interesting for website designers is to deploy the agent to do something on your own website and see how it does it. Is your website user friendly enough for the agent to understand what to do next? Or is there a break? I could see that being a useful tool. I know we use tools like… Why? It’s escaping me. Microsoft, What is escaping me? Microsoft, is it Clarity? Oh, yeah, Clarity. Yeah, I’m not going to say… To see actual real-time users use your website.

Jeremy: Yeah, or does this workflow of my website make sense based on the history of the internet or something?

Emily: Yeah, let’s deploy an agent to get real-time, tell it to do exactly what we want it to do and see if it does it.

Jeremy: I don’t know. I’m just looking forward to do any shortcuts. Just going back to that DMC meeting that you referenced, one of the takeaways from that for me was, try to get AI to do things that you don’t want to do. Things that I don’t want to do are making decks and slides in PowerPoint or Google Sheets. Or Google Slides. I had that wrong. One of those products. I If this can basically look at data and then auto-export this data into slides, and I just don’t know how good the connection is going to be, but that could be a huge time saver because what we don’t want to spend time on is trying to make decks look pretty all the time. If this just gets us 80% of the way there, even 50% of the way there, it literally just puts the text in the slides in a legible way. That would be absolutely huge. And one of the big benefits I see to that is these decks could probably be created more often. We could be like, This is the data for the last two weeks. Here’s a nice mini slide. Maybe it’s only a few sides long, and this is what it is.

Jeremy: Here’s some charts. And it would allow us to focus more on what is this data actually saying to us or what can we do with this data versus how do I put this data in a way to make it understandable for clients or as a business owner.

Emily: Right. 100%. I think there’s so much good that’s going to come out of this, and it’s going to make our jobs that much better.

Jeremy: What’s even more fun is what we don’t like about it. I’m trying to think of what I don’t like, personally. You can start out.

Emily: Well, obviously, Like you mentioned, it’s like you mentioned. It’s going to take away a lot of that grunt work, but it’s going to leave us more opportunity, and I think almost more mental bandwidth to focus on the strategic part of why we’re doing things. You’re no longer going to have to waste time on trying to how to format this image on this deck or pull this specific data. We can focus more on reading that data and interpreting that data. Ultimately, that is what for us our clients are looking for.

Jeremy: Making decisions with it versus presenting it.

Emily: What’s the what’s now? I have not seen AI do a good job of that.

Jeremy: I know we talked about it before, but it’s not a strategic replacement. It is going to make mistakes. I know you talked about the ordering groceries for you. It It didn’t do it right.

Emily: No, it didn’t. It left off some things. It ordered some things that I actually didn’t need. Surprisingly, I do own some flour. So like I said, I needed that element of it to be 20 % better. So obviously still using it and looking over everything that it’s producing. And obviously, more still privacy concerns, especially as more comes out with indexing and things like that that I’m sure we’ll talk about later.

Jeremy: Yeah, and it’s It’s not going to make any decisions for us, at least at Granular. But it is fun having the agent or ChatGPT as an assistant. What do you think? It gets to know how you think, and it saves memories. That’s the way I use it is I usually will think of something and be like, ChatGPT, what do you think of this? Am I missing anything? If this agent just helps me use whatever is happening in ChatGPT, putting it in a different place or accessing tools, if it can read my… We’re not doing this, but if it could read my email and read my data and then help me put that into a slide, and then we can actually move brands forward. That’s what it gets me excited about. But what I don’t like about it, again, the main thing is just mistakes. You can’t fully trust it. It’s going to make mistakes. It may hallucinate. It’s going to get better with time. But it’s just It’s more of a fun tool to try out versus anything that you can actually rely on.

Emily: All right, let’s hit us with another one. What’s another high impact update? We could go on that all day, but- We really could.

Jeremy: We could talk about grocery shopping all day, probably, too. Yeah. Next, so some Google AI updates that came out. Shopping gets virtual try on, smarter price alerts, and outfit and room design inspiration. So I thought this was super cool. Let me just read our official update here. So Google rolled out… Wow, if I could talk. Let me read our official update here. So Google rolled out several shopping upgrades leveraging AI. First, an AI-powered virtual try-on for Apparel is now live in the US, allowing users to upload a photo of themselves and see how clothing would look on them. Google’s AI can simulate the fit on different body types, which is super cool. Second, price tracking alerts got smarter. Shoppers can set price drop alerts for with specific conditions like size, color, and a target price threshold. When the item hits that price you want in your chosen size or color, Google will notify you. So finally, coming in fall, what I want to bring up is the AI-generated outfit inspiration. So you can actually try some of this now in AI mode. So I’m not sure when this officially comes out or if it’s out right now because I was able to actually go into AI mode and type in, I’m looking for a green outfit for a wedding.

Jeremy: I don’t know why I’d wear a green outfit to a wedding, but it comes up with a full outfit. I just think that’s also super cool to be like, Here are shoes, here’s a hat, here’s a shirt, here’s pants. The fact that it’s a conversation in AI mode just makes it way more personalized. I would have to imagine that in the future, these are going to be sponsored. There’s going to be a sponsored look, and then there’s going to be the organic looks. But it’s very Very useful.

Emily: Yeah, I think it’s awesome. If I’m in Ecom right now, I am super excited for this. But also I need to get my shit together on my feed. This should be red flags, alarming. I feel like this has been a long time coming. If your feed sucks, you need to get it together. That’s just what it is. I’m talking these blurry photos. You think that’s going to stand a chance next to somebody who’s able to try on something? No. You’re blurry photo isn’t going to stand a chance. You really do need high-quality images, getting your product feed organized, title optimization, making sure you have all the necessary fields. I’m pulling in. If I’m an e-com advertiser right now, even though this is not available for ads, I’m getting it together. So when the second it comes out, I qualify.

Jeremy: Even for those free listings in general, you should have that all set up. Yes. I can’t imagine. I don’t know if Google is officially released, what allows you to be eligible for this? Because I think it’s only for specific brands that they’re testing out right now. Sure, of course. But a lot of times, you’re auto-opted into this. So I wonder if you’re going to need specific images, but it could just be that one day it just turns on for your brand. If you have a good enough feed and your products fit the room design or the clothes inspiration, I think you’ll probably just be auto opted into it.

Emily: I agree. Or it’s going to have or Google is going to offer certain AI tools to take what you have and almost get it to work, which is what we’re seeing more and more from meta, where it’s just taking whatever assets you have and whether that’s adding backgrounds, making it move, expanding the image, which are some other updates in here. But honestly, I’d want more of the control. I’d get your feed together. That’s the biggest thing about… It’s not necessarily what I don’t like. It’s, Hey, here’s what I would be doing.

Jeremy: I think one thing that we also really like, and we touched on it, but didn’t officially say it, this makes everything interactive and personalized. We know that the future of search is going to be in AI mode. I’ve started using it more. I use ChatGPT a lot of times as well. It’s really because things are interactive and personalized. It’s different from the regular surf where it’s just like, what does Google think I want or who’s gaming the system with SEO to show up on top? This is This really feels like it’s going to be a big solution. If I’m able to type in, I really like these brands, I really like these colors. I’m going to this event. What do you think I should buy? It literally gives me a couple of different options, and not even just like, shirts, like looks. The fact that you can get looks is huge. What will be interesting is to see Is it going to put Nike shoes with an Adidas shirt? You know what I mean? I don’t know how that’s going to play out. You have to give it some guidelines. Is it going to mix brands?

Jeremy: Is that going to be allowed? Is that going to be a setting on shopping when this eventually comes to shopping?

Emily: It’s like, are you okay if your competitor’s hat is matched with your shirt? Right, exactly. You’re going to have to be, and I guess you don’t care if you get the sale, but I don’t know.

Jeremy: Well, shopping ads have to go to this to survive eventually.

Emily: Oh, yeah. Yes.

Jeremy: Is there anything we don’t like about this?

Emily: I think there’s nothing I don’t like about this. I think it’s more like, Hey, here’s what I would be doing if I am in an e-com, especially if I’m an e-com advertiser, more of something like that.

Jeremy: Next one is Instagram opens up to Google search. Meta began allowing search engines to index public Instagram content from business creator accounts, the professional accounts for people 18 plus. Reels, posts, carousels can now appear in Google’s organic results. What do we like about this, Emily?

Emily: I mean, this is not necessarily my wheelhouse. I’m surprisingly not an influencer or not necessarily an SEO. But now your social posts are going to gain SEO reach. Obviously, that means double value for your content, not only showing on Instagram, but also the potential to show up on search. So just simple things that you can do just on your page, making sure you have solid captions, alternate text, hashtags, all that can improve visibility.

Jeremy: I’ll tell you what I like about this is typically when you’re on Google, I know Google has partnerships with Reddit and these other companies, but the fact that I could be like, this sounds dumb, but if you were somebody that’s like, What is Justin Bieber up to? You’re like, What is my- That is one of my top 10 searches. What is Jason Momoa up to? That’s his name, right? Yeah. Okay. The fact that it could show up right on Google is amazing to me because it is opening up that walled garden in a way, where now social media is on the surf. I just like that. I like that crossover. I like that. Typically, you’d have to be like, what is this person’s Instagram? And then go to that page to see what they’re up to. But I wonder for brands, obviously, I’m bringing up like, celebrities, but for brands, it’s nice. If you’re posting organic updates all the time on social media, like good videos, you should feel good about the fact that those might show up on Google now when people are searching for your brand. Yeah.

Emily: You might even change your whole organic strategy, honestly.

Jeremy: To be able to show up for that. I would. Yeah, or even start having an organic strategy. Because some of these brands haven’t been posting on organic because it’s been so pay to play. But reels have been important. There’s good viewership there. We’ll see if Google has other partnerships, but I’m excited about it. The scary thing would be, I guess, if your brand made an inappropriate post of some sort or if you got hacked, and then now people aren’t only finding it on Instagram, they’re finding it on Google. Google. How long is that going to live on Google?

Emily: I don’t know. Alma got hacked recently. It’s just one more spotlight on you that you need to control from a content standpoint and almost a PR standpoint as well, potentially.

Jeremy: Exactly. Cool. Next. Google Keyword Planner now offers localized forecasts, so you can now get projected impressions, clicks, and costs broken down by city, region, or DMA. Let’s go. Sweet. This was…

Emily: This is awesome. Why didn’t we have this I was like, When I read this, I’m like, We needed this years ago. Thank you. Thank you, Google.

Jeremy: It differentiates Google because for some of this keyword research, typically, we’d always go to Keyword Planner, and then we’d search on Google and look for the similar searches. But a lot of times people are just going to the LLM, so they’re going to ChatGPT and being like, What are the best keywords? And honestly, that was a better experience in a lot of ways to just get the keywords. It didn’t give you the forecast, or maybe it would hallucinate and try. But the fact that we can get these right in Keyword Planner makes me want to use this tool more.

Emily: Oh, my gosh. Game changer for smaller budget businesses, too. Absolutely. Or people who advertise more locally.

Jeremy: Or even seasonal businesses that are like, Hey, we only want to advertise on the East Coast or something during this season. I think it’s super awesome. We’re going to use it. It felt like we should have had it 10 years ago, but we have it now.

Emily: And I guess what we don’t like, obviously, is Keyword Planner only gets you so far. I don’t use it. I don’t log into it, and I look at it, and I’m like, Okay, I have all the answers. That’s all I needed to do for Keyword Planner. Replating, I’m just going to blindly say, this is what our CPCs are going to be. This is what our competition is going to be. No, let’s be realistic. That’s not it.

Jeremy: Those CPCs are too high sometimes, and sometimes they’re not high enough.

Emily: Right. I have not found it to be super accurate. However, whatever, directionally, trends, at least giving you an idea, getting you from, I know nothing about a certain area and how this is going to perform, to, Here’s 25%.

Jeremy: Totally.

Emily: I think that’s helpful. But that’s what I don’t like. Obviously, it’s not the one-stop shop answer. You still need that strategic mind and honestly experience of running ads.

Jeremy: Absolutely. Yeah. So next update that we’re going to talk about is Meta Ads Creative Breakdown for AI and Variations. They introduced new breakdown options to analyze performance of automatically created variations in ads. For ads using features like Advantage Plus Creative, which might tweak brightness or contrast or AI-generated elements, you can now break down the results by each creative variant, which my initial reaction is cool. Another one of those things where it’s like, you’re expecting us to use some of this stuff and not really know how it’s performing. It It reminds me of almost old-school P-Max in a way where it’s like, trust me, bro. I don’t trust me, bro, in advertising in general. I like testing that stuff, but I want to know what’s working. I actually haven’t looked at this feature yet because I would say in general, we’re not using a lot of these features in meta. I don’t think they’re great. I mean, some of the ones that aren’t technically labeled AI are pretty good. Make my image fit better in stories, that’s not what it’s called, but there are some advantage plus creative options that I do like. But any of the ones labeled AI, those are the ones that get you into trouble with brands that care.

Jeremy: If you’re running a brand that has strict brand guidelines and the music option, which is something that’s in there, is adding a lullaby to it.

Emily: Which I’ve seen.

Jeremy: I’ve experienced this because Meta will try to put these on by default. And even if you go to Edit and add, sometimes I feel like they’re sneaking back on. So if we can get some insight into that, I’ll take it. But there’s just so many different options for the advantage plus creative. I was going to pull some of them up because I feel like there’s more and more of them. They’re harder to find out how to turn them off. The idea of them is cool, but for me right now, we We work with a car auction company. There’s not a chance I’m going to let Meta AI create car ads for people to consign or register to bid. And by the way, we’ve tested it, and it is hilarious. I almost want to use some of these ads because they’re so bad that they’d probably get a really good action rate or something. The one that I do think is cool, but we weren’t actually able to use just because it was too much of a black box. But the background. It’s AI, I will replace your background. I love that one for e-commerce.

Emily: Oh, I love it. And it does make the image pop, and it looks good. It reminds me like they take backgrounds like when you were in school and you’re back to school. A hundred %. Your mom can pick the background and you’re like, Which background? It gives that vibe, but I actually think it looks really good, and I agree. That’s the one I am actually currently using for an e-com client.

Jeremy: Typically, in the past, I would have asked companies to pay another company to make these images for them. Just because it does make it pop, it feels less like some like Timu random ad. It makes it feel a bit more personalized. But just some of the enhancements that are on here, There are so many. There’s adjust, brightness, and contrast, show products, which is another scary one because if you’re an agency or a brand that has multiple brands, if that accidentally gets checked, you could have Nike shoes with a political ad or something. You got to be watching these settings always.

Emily: I think you hit the nail on the head with this one. It basically summed back to the update. It’s like, Yeah, thanks, Meta. Great. I love more insight. I’m never going to say I don’t want that, but I still think using these tools with caution is how I would proceed forward. I think always test, like you said, you tested it. You’re going to give it a chance. Whenever something new comes out, we check it out. We don’t blindly apply, but then know when to pull back. But yeah, great. Thanks, Meta. Appreciate the extra data, but I’m good right now, I think.

Jeremy: Next, Google Ads rolls out asset-level performance metrics for RSAs. Those are your responsive search ads, which we’ve all been using forever. You get all the different headline options and all the different descriptions. And typically, we had labels that were just low, good, or best. And I can confirm this is live. I actually don’t I don’t know how long this has been live in the accounts, but you can actually see impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and conversions now for these assets, which, duh.

Emily: About time. I have clients ask me all the time, Hey, what headline is working? What description is working? Because I’m a big advocate for spend a little paid dollars to see what’s working. Use those in your organic assets or your emails or things that you might not get as immediate data back on. And when I have to tell them, Well, this one’s low, this one’s best, this one’s high, everyone’s like, Well, what does that mean?

Jeremy: And I’m like, This is all the insight I have.

Emily: So now the fact that we have this, not only is this going to help craft better search copy, but also take those learnings and apply it in other marketing material. Right. Paid is a great place to learn because you can get data very quickly.

Jeremy: Yeah. And I think I’m sure Google was hesitant with this for the same reason they’re hesitant for PMax is sometimes the data can tell the wrong story. So there might be headlines that don’t get a ton of conversions, but they might still have a low CPA or a high ROAS. So Google might be thinking, I don’t want them to pause this because for this specific user in this place at this time, it is the right ad. So I would say, use caution with this and just Just because something might seem lower performing, it doesn’t always mean you should pause it. But if something’s obviously not even being used, if you have an ad, if all your headlines have 10,000 impressions and there’s a couple that have five, well, I would replace those because they’re not even getting a shot. If they’re not getting a shot, get them out of there.

Emily: I think you brought up a good point, too. I think it could set you up for a little analysis paralysis where you have all this data and you’re just frozen. You feel like you have to make a decision based off the data where that’s not necessarily true. Again, another update that I feel is more of a directional move. It gives you something. Yeah. Then again, you have nothing. Here’s 25%.

Jeremy: We didn’t always even get low, good, or bad. Sometimes it would just be learning, or I forget what it said, unknown, something like that. At least you have some data to work with here. The next update. I think this update is so cool. The Smart Bidding Exploration is rolling out. We announced this a few months ago, I think, that Google was working on this, and I can confirm now that it’s in accounts. But let me actually explain it. I guess I should probably do that first. We are now seeing Smart Bidding Exploration for search campaigns using target ROAS. It loosens ROAS constraints, aiming for up to about 20% more conversions. I’ll try to explain the way this works. Again, this is only in search. I looked everywhere in shopping to try to find this, which is where I want to use it the most, to be honest. But it’ll just let you flex your target ROAS. You can basically say if your ROAS was a 300%, you could be like, Well, you have the option to go down to 250% to see if that gives a boost. What I don’t like is, one, I haven’t used it yet, so I don’t know what this is going to look like.

Jeremy: Is there going to be some reporting that’s like, Oh, you turn this flexible smart bidding exploration on, and we think you got this many conversions because of it, or is it just going to be like, We’re just going to go to the lower row as?

Emily: Yeah, I don’t know. What I don’t like about this is I just feel it’s like it’s another way that it could potentially drive up your CPCs. Oh, 100%. Honestly. So I mean, like I said- Or get a lower ROAS even. Yes. I think to your point, I need to see that data here because you had this on. This is what you got. And then at that point, I also still have to think, is that going to be accurate? But it is cool. It’s another feature and another thing to test, which is always cool. I, like you, am not currently running any search campaigns on Target ROAS, so I haven’t seen this myself. But yeah, if it comes to shopping, hello.

Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. I run search campaigns, Target ROAS, but for Ecom brands, search campaigns are usually not the focus, so they have much lower budgets. What I would like, again, is to have this for P Max with a feed or just shopping in general, because if we could get more conversions, that makes sense. But also you lower your target ROAS, Google’s claiming up to 20% more conversions. Duh. That’s going to be my new thing. Duh. Duh. Yeah, you’re going to get more conversions.

Emily: You’ve seen that thing that you hold up?

Jeremy: Yeah.