The Click Brief- January 2026

Top Takeaways

OpenAI Tests Ads in ChatGPTmation

Ads begin rolling out to Free and Go users, with ~$60 CPM chatter for high-intent queries.
Relevancy and answer independence will determine whether users accept ads inside AI.

TikTok Expands Smart Automation

Smart Plus reduces setup friction while TikTok One and Market Scope centralize creative and analytics.
Automation is scaling — transparency and control remain critical.

Google Builds for Agentic Commerce

Universal Commerce Protocol standardizes AI-to-retailer connections.
AI Mode checkout allows purchases directly within search and Gemini.
Structured product data becomes even more essential.

Platform Quick Hits

PMax budget controls expand.
Microsoft adds Copilot checkout.
Pinterest leans into authenticity amid AI fatigue.

Super Bowl AI Ad Takeaways

OpenAI: inspirational, developer-focused.
Anthropic: clever anti-ad positioning.
Gemini: clear, emotional, practical — strongest mainstream message.

Follow The Click Brief for fast, no-fluff performance marketing updates.

Visit The Click Brief blog for more in-depth analysis and updates from January.

Episode Transcript

Jeremy: Hello, and welcome to the Click Brief podcast.

Emily: Your monthly download of what’s new and what matters in digital advertising in paid media.

Jeremy: I’m Jeremy Packee, here with Emily Anderson.

Emily: After a slower December in terms of updates, January came out swinging. OpenAI is officially testing ads. Tiktok is overhauling everything with smart plus and TikTok One. And Google is laying the groundwork for a GenTech e-commerce. And that’s just the start. Plus, Jeremy and I are going to be watching a few of the AI brand Super Bowl ads from yesterday and giving our takes on what we like, what we didn’t like, what we’re nervous about, and what was exciting. Starting off with the high impact updates.

Jeremy: So on January On October 16th, OpenAI officially announced its approach to advertising and began testing ads for ChatGPT free and ChatGPT Go users in the US. The initial rollout focuses on strict guardrails around privacy and answer independence, ensuring ad placements do not bias the AI’s generated responses. For the invite-only beta, a minimum of over $200,000 campaign budget is required. What do we think?

Emily: I mean, here we go. We knew it was coming. It was a matter of time. I think we both knew that ChatGPT, OpenAI, we’re going to be the first to intro ads, and then the rest will domino. However, after yesterday’s Super Bowl ad with Claude, they basically made an ad saying they’re not having advertising. So we’ll get to that later, but that was interesting. But yeah, I think the biggest chatter I saw, again, not surprising that they came out with ads. The biggest chatter was people were, I feel, sticker shocked by the average a CPM.

Jeremy: But honestly, 60 dollars for a thousand- And that’s like 60-ish dollars, we think?

Emily: Yeah. That’s what they’re saying. But $60 for a thousand highly qualified queries?

Jeremy: Yeah. If we can trust that, that would not be that bad. People would be shocked if they saw what average search CPMs were. Nobody looks at search CPMs. Those are often in the hundreds of dollars, but obviously using intent-based keywords and all of that. But in theory, this would be better. But also, is it going to be really based on that super high intent? When is the ad going to be shown? And also, I feel like OpenAI is taking a lot of heat for this, but Google has been doing this for a while with their AI. We’ve been talking about it in AI overviews or AI mode. It’s obviously not the straight up Gemini user interface, but I think this is cool, and I’m excited to see where it goes. It could be We just don’t know.

Emily: Yeah, it’s too early to say. And I, personally, I am a ChatGPT Go user. I haven’t seen any ads in my feed yet either. So I can’t speak to how relevant they are. Because as a user, if the ad relevancy is very high, then I’m more okay with it. I do think that’s an area where Google started to slip over time. Ad relevancy, I feel like the quality there went down.

Jeremy: With broad match and all that stuff.

Emily: Yeah. As a user, it’s like, Oh, now I have to sort through all this. That’s why these LLMs are so popular. It cuts your work time on your search in half. It’s so much… It’s such a better user experience to have a robot scan all these pages and then get you the answer you’re looking for versus you doing it.

Jeremy: It’s funny because I have mixed feelings where it’s like, sometimes I don’t trust AI, and then sometimes I do. But I I do feel like my experience with a ChatGPT or a Gemini or AI Mode, when I’m looking for a specific product, it usually gets it right more than it gets it wrong. I’m like, Oh, this is exactly what I was looking for based on this picture that I took and my preferences and my size and how I want it to fit or the exact part that I want. So if it’s just placing an ad in that moment, I think as a user, I personally am not super flicked out about it unless it is just it’s not the right match. If you’re getting the wrong ad, then yeah, that sucks.

Emily: Then your trust is also going to go down, too. You’re like, well, this… And I feel like that’s a game where they have to be careful because people are still in that same predicament you are. Like, are we trusting this? Are we not? You know what I mean? So if all of a sudden you’re getting irrelevant ad queries, now this is feeling like I don’t know.

Jeremy: Google shopping ads are usually pretty relevant, I would say. You can obviously game the system a little bit and have super high bids or things like that, but it just has to be the right product. I think if it’s genuinely a right product, then that’s great. But if these are big businesses and they can somehow buy their way into these AI chat bots, well, then we’re not going to trust them. We’re not going to use it for products. But I think it’s a cool thing. I’m excited to try it when we get a chance to. We’ll see if it’s just more awareness-based. We’ll see how the ads eventually show up. But yeah, I think it’s like a wait and see deal. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Next update that I thought was interesting. Tiktok launched a bunch of smart plus automation features, creative tools, and first-party analytics. So a bunch of updates. This was announced on January 21st, obviously, along with the migration to the US-owned servers in partnership with Oracle. But there’s Smart Plus, an automated campaign solution designed to cut set up steps and optimize for business goals. Cool. Whenever you cut steps out, I get a little bit nervous because I’m like, What steps are you cutting out?

Jeremy: These are usually pretty custom, but if it works, great. If it just turns into a remarketing campaign for your customers that you already have, well, then that sucks.

Emily: Yeah, I agree. I think this is following suit to basically what’s Meta been moving towards. So this feels pretty similar with some different names. However, something to keep an eye on. I mean, I’m here for TikTok. I’ve been a fan. Curious. Obviously, their ownership changed earlier this year with all of that. So a lot of people, they’ve been under a microscope for a long time, so I’m not surprised to see- I got bored of reporting on it because I’m like, I don’t know if anything’s going to happen. I guess I’m staying tuned to what other changes come to their ad platforms and updates they’re making. I just feel like this is the beginning of them moving in that direction. And all of these engineers bounce around at different companies. So I’m sure they have people who used to work at Meta. This is feeling very similar to that, I guess.

Jeremy: As long as we can do the basic things that we need to do, I’m fine. If it’s truly making things easier, then no problem. Don’t default to the wrong identity. Cool. If that is something like that, it’s a feature, then great. Tiktok One. They made updates to this. It’s just more centralized. It’s a creative hub for sourcing creators, production tools, insights. I don’t use this too often, but anytime they make maybe things that exist in multiple different areas, when they make into one place, that’s cool. So no other comments on that besides that everything living within that one spot is usually a good idea. The TikTok Pulse Suite. So this is expanded premium inventory that places brands next to the hottest trending content. So this is cool. So this is just a way to get your ad next to the hot content, right?

Emily: So I think that’s- Yeah, and when it What is next to, I guess, can we elaborate what that means? Because to me, in TikTok, an ad is basically you’re scrolling, you get an ad and you scroll through it.

Jeremy: Yeah. So I think it’s still that. But typically when you buy on, I mean, really any platform, Instagram, Facebook. When you’re serving that ad, you don’t really have that much control of where it shows up when people are scrolling. So I believe what this does is it gives you inventory to say, let’s just use Mr. Beast as an example. You can be close to the Mr. Beast video. You know what I mean? It just puts you near the hot content so that you have a likelihood to be around what’s trending or relevant. So I think that’s cool. There’s definitely reasons I could see for using that.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I’m curious if that has to be a separate campaign. I mean, obviously, if it’s premium inventory, you’re probably paying premium prices.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think it’s just a feature in there. I haven’t tried to set it up, but I don’t think it’s… I don’t know if it’s a separate campaign. It might just be a placement. I would have to double check on that.

Emily: But I do like the feature. Yeah, it’s still new, too. I guess. It just came out this month or last month.

Jeremy: Because it makes me laugh sometimes because I don’t know. I get served some pretty wild content sometimes on any platform. And there are legitimate ads right next to it. It might be something that’s completely not brand-appropriate, and there’ll be an ad there. But the companies really don’t have any control over that, and you just have to do it. But if you have some control over what you show up next to, that’s cool. And obviously, there are some controls out there, but they’re not perfect. So they also talked about the market scope. So this is a new first-party analytics platform to identify and activate audiences across the funnel using TikTok’s own data. So I think that’s neat. I’d have to go into more detail on what you can actually do with this, but any analytics platform built in the interface, I’ll try it. I don’t know how good it’ll be. So we’ll just have to wait and see what we can do with that.

Emily: Just another step in the direction of the TikTok basically pushing more server-side tracking as well, so then you can get more first-party data into the algorithm.

Jeremy: Yeah, they mentioned you can use it to understand your organic and paid insights and audiences and engagement at different funnel stages. So if it does that, then great. We’ll try it. So here’s another one. I think this is just a big deal overall.

Emily: It goes into what we were talking about earlier with shopping.

Jeremy: Absolutely. So big AI updates. Google announced a new open standard for agentic commerce alongside specific AI tools designed to help retailers succeed in an agentic shopping era. The protocol aims to standardize how AI agents connect with retailers to drive sales and interactions. And this was a big update. So there was a There’s a lot of stuff going on here.

Emily: It has its own landing… Like Google released its own update landing page that you can go check it out.

Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. So looking at some of the summary, a summary of the landing page. So what does this blog post actually say? And if you’re looking for the blog post, the blog post is called, let’s see here, New tech and Tools for Retailers to Succeed in an Agentic Shopping Era. But essentially what this gets into is the Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol called UCP. And that’s just designed to support agentic commerce, meaning AI agents can interact more easily with retailer systems throughout the shopping process. So it essentially creates a common language for commerce systems. It’s intended to let different AI agents, retailers, payment providers, and consumer services work together without each needing a unique integration. So it really just creates a common language, a standardized language for everything to talk together. So it’s not all pieced together. And it talks about covering the entire shopping journey from discovery to buying. Ucp will now be used in Google AI shopping features. So there’s a new checkout feature, which I thought was really neat. And I’m looking directly here. I know you can’t see it, but directly at the blog post. So there’s all sorts of features in here.

Jeremy: There’s a new branded AI agent. So a business agent. I know Meta was doing some of this, but essentially a new way for shoppers to chat directly with brands right on search. So that’s pretty neat. That’s already live with some retailers, and Google does mention some where you can try it out. So that’s a unique experience. There’s also direct offers. So within some of these new experiences in AI mode, you’ll type in whatever you’re looking for, and you might get an offer in AI mode, which makes sense. We run shopping promotions all the time. It would make sense that it make it in here. So just a lot of features to overall just trying to make it all make sense and easy. I don’t even know if any of that really made sense. It’s a lot, but if you just look at the update, it might not seem like a lot, but I think it’s a big deal.

Emily: Yeah, it’s just… To me, I look at it as, Okay, this is just another shift, I think, in marketing, from persuading humans to click on your product to structure sharing your information so machines and LLMs understand your products so then it can serve them. So, yeah, overall, I think it’s a very big update. I think we’re going to see more come of this in December. In our end of year update, I’m sure we’re going to be far from this, and it’s going to be so much more advanced. This is obviously just January we’re talking about. And easy, hopefully, too.

Jeremy: Yeah. Easy to implement. Easy to implement.

Emily: They list the partners in that update as well of who they’re trying to simplify it with.

Jeremy: It’s like the Walmarts and stuff, the big companies.

Emily: Well, you would think it would be. But also Shopify in there as well.

Jeremy: I totally forgot to mention this, but They also mentioned that they’re going to have a new checkout feature on eligible Google product listings in AI mode in search and in the Gemini app. So that’s going to allow shoppers to check out from eligible US retailers right as they’re researching on Google. So they say it’s going to be secure, and they can confidently buy with Google Pay and different payment methods. But yeah, you’ll be able to make a purchase directly in there. And I have an example right here, Emily. I think you can see my screen, but you can just check out right in that interface. I think that’s pretty huge.

Emily: I love that. Yeah. Hey, anytime I don’t have to go grab my credit card and put my information in, I feel like the conversion rate of the website I’m on goes way up. Because I need putting my number in.

Jeremy: Oh, absolutely. The only scary thing is, I guess it’s bypassing the whole website experience, which is- I think we’re getting to that point. Yeah, I agree, but it is interesting. You can already buy in TikTok shop and different places like that. But the fact that you could be in AI mode and you could say, I’m looking, the example they have here is a piece of luggage, and you might find the luggage you like, and you could just check out right away. It makes sense. It should be like that. But the fact that you’re bypassing the whole website is different.

Emily: I mean, look what Amazon is doing with the buy now button as well. And then they recently added the Add to Tomorrow delivery button. Oh, yeah. That essentially also just completely bypasses the checkout system. I bought something on Amazon, and then I needed to buy something else. And it was crazy, just a one click, it’s coming in my next delivery. It didn’t even I didn’t check out. I didn’t put a face ID in. I’m like, well, my kid is going to definitely accidentally buy me six things from here when they’re on my phone, when he steals it. I need to put a lock on this or something. I just think it’s- But, yeah, big update For sure.

Jeremy: I think it’s so cool that you could be like, I’m looking for my daughter. I’m looking for a unicorn, a backpack that, I don’t know. That’s Purple and sing. Yeah. And it’s like, oh, here it is. And I can just buy it right there. I think it’s a very good user experience. For sure. Cool. Other impacts that we just want to mention, but they aren’t as groundbreaking I do think we covered the biggest ones. And let’s not forget to watch the Super Bowl ads just to get a vibe check. We’ll do that at the end, but I’ll go through the rest of the updates so you can read it about more on the blog. Microsoft Advertising, they rolled out some new Performance Max updates and copilot checkout. So it sounds familiar, right? Checkout right in copilot. We just saw it in AI mode and Gemini. So that’s obviously coming across the board. Google P-Max and shopping. So there’s total budgets, direct offers, and promo updates. We talked about these, I think, a while ago, but I can confirm that I’m seeing those in the account. I was hoping to have them in Q4, 2025, but I didn’t see those I have total budgets as an option there in all my accounts.

Jeremy: So that’s great. There’s totally situations where you would want to say $10,000 for this specific product for this specific week for maybe a product launch, a sale. And Google, just spend that budget accordingly. I love that feature. Use similar features on meta all the time. We also included, you might have something to say about this, Emily. Pinterest just had this interesting blog post on how Gen Z is taking back their taste. So moving away from algorithmic sameness towards unique eclectic styles. I think that’s pretty interesting. I thought it was a good read. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Emily: I think Pinterest is a huge AI slot problem in general, so it’s good to see that they are recognizing that. I did a quick search while you were mentioning that because I feel like, and again, I didn’t tune in to all the ads at the Super Bowl as much as I wanted to, so I’m glad we’re going to rewatch some of them because I still need to do that. And I felt like a brand also did a similar thing with Gen Z and trying to move away from AI because the burnout of AI is so strong. And I feel like that- I feel weird when I see it sometimes.

Jeremy: They call it the uncanny valley or whatever, where I’m like, I don’t know what feels off about this, but it feels like I don’t know. Maybe I just have to get used to it. I don’t know. It just feels bizarre knowing that’s not a real person that’s telling me to buy a product or is acting. Right, for sure.

Emily: So, yeah, I feel like a different brand touched on this last night. Now, that’s slipping my mind. But yeah, Pinterest needs to figure it out. I mean, it’s unbearable to even go on.

Jeremy: I don’t use Pinterest that much. I thought the messaging was interesting. Here’s just a little like an excerpt from it. It These days it feels like we all hear the same viral songs and our feeds push the same outfits. We let our algorithms decide what we see and tell us what we’re supposed to like. Spending time online doesn’t help us find what we love anymore because we’re losing touch with our own taste.

Emily: So They’re saying that Pinterest has- I’m saying that they have that issue. They’re not doing it.

Jeremy: They’re not living with their preaching here?

Emily: Well, they weren’t before. To me, this sounds like they realized that that was an issue, and now they’re going to take steps maybe to reduce the amount of AI slop what they have, or they see it as a true branding opportunity to be like, Okay, all these other platforms are moving heavier into this. Let’s try to stick to authenticity because I think humans really do like the uniqueness.

Jeremy: Which is obvious, but it’s not just a Gen Z thing, but I think it’s interesting that they’re saying that people don’t know what they like anymore. We weaken our own sense of taste. That’s a line from this.

Emily: That’s a powerful line.

Jeremy: Yeah. And maybe that’s true. They’re like, What do I like? I jokingly say this with some people on the team that when somebody asked, What should we get a… I don’t know what I should buy. I’m like, Well, just ask ChatGPT what you like. I say that as a joke, but that might be the reality for people that outsource a lot of the critical thinking here. And they talk about it being harder to make decisions. I can agree with that. I feel like sometimes hard to make decisions when you have a million options.

Emily: Yeah, totally.

Jeremy: Yeah, I just found this interesting.

Emily: It’s a great article. It’s very interesting take. Excited to see what more comes from that, from Pinterest for sure.

Jeremy: I agree.

Emily: I’m following.

Jeremy: Cool. Other updates. Google deployed multimodal AI to catch fraudulent advertisers. That’s fine. I mean, it’s never fun when there’s fake or suspect companies that are showing up in the SERP, maybe increasing your CPCs. That’s great. That’s pretty obvious. They should just always do that. Metamade ads on threads global. I don’t really care about this that much, but that’s cool.

Emily: I did have a client ask me about that, if their threads and was attached to their account. And just so it’s known, so your Instagram handle and your threads account handle are the same. So it automatically connects if you I have a threads account, so you can see it linked up in business manager, but it should be in there under the… Now, threads has its own. It goes page, Instagram, and threads. You can see it up in there as well. But I just had somebody ask that question. I thought it was a good question, and I think it probably sprung from this bullet point. Cool.

Jeremy: So we’re going to end this. We’ll just watch these three commercials that I just pulled literally off of YouTube. I just typed in OpenAI Super Bowl commercial. I wanted to see an Anthropic Super Bowl commercial, and you may have seen ones that I didn’t. I’m sure there’s multiple.

Emily: What is it? Claude?

Jeremy: Claude.

Emily: Claude. Yeah. Did I say it wrong before?

Jeremy: I’m not sure. You said Claude, which is for sure wrong. Claude.

Emily: What is it? Claude? Yeah. That name is really hard for me to say.

Jeremy: It is weird. Yeah.

Emily: Okay. Well, whatever. I’m going to sound dumb on it.

Jeremy: And then I typed in Gemini. So again, there could be multiple variations of this, but I just wanted to see This is what showed up when I typed it. Let’s just watch these, and we’ll just talk about them after. We’re going to start off with the OpenAI one. So the one that we watched was the you can just build things based on codex. I think the messaging was cool. I don’t know if I didn’t know what that was. If I didn’t know what OpenAI was, I don’t know if I would take away from that commercial. I can build apps and stuff, but the messaging is cool. You can just build things There’s a lot of people who already know what you can tell you with LLMs.

Emily: But it is funny to me because I do feel like with a lot of LLMs, I feel like I get this sense from a lot of people that people feel like they’re behind on them, or they don’t quite know what to use them for yet, or they haven’t found that the tool is totally usable yet. It’s not quite there yet. And I think that is the case. But I feel like a lot of people feel like maybe they’re behind because of that. And I feel like I want those people to know that as long as you’re exposing yourself to it, I I feel like you’re right where you need to be and just… Because it’s not quite there yet, I think, in a lot of cases. But the fact that the line was, you can just build things is funny to me because of that, because it’s like, yeah, we don’t really know what you’re going to build. You can do it.

Jeremy: That is a funny way. That’s such a good point, though. That’s how I feel about it. What do you do with AI? I don’t know. You just build things? I haven’t seen too many finished products that I’m like, Wow, this is amazing, but it feels so close at times. I’m like, Oh, this is It’s almost usable except for this thing, but you can customize it. And then maybe there’s a security issue. But for just toying around and saying you want to make an app that can look at creative and give you the… I don’t know what persona it’s good for. You can build stuff like that. I would say this is a feel good commercial for the most part.

Emily: I’m okay with it. It’s It’s not going to be one that I’m like, That was incredible. It doesn’t go close to those emotional hitting Google ads.

Jeremy: I think it tried to, though.

Emily: It did, but I think Google plays with the heartstrings a little harder.

Jeremy: So next we’ll go Anthropic. Anthropic is going for the throat a little bit in this ad.

Emily: This is the one I was referring to.

Jeremy: Okay. I just didn’t know if this was it or not.

Emily: I think so.

Jeremy: Okay, let’s watch it. I’ll let you start off. You tell me.

Emily: That was exactly what I was talking about, how they took a shot at Open AI’s ads.

Jeremy: Yeah, everybody’s taking a shot at Open AI. But I’m like, Google’s been doing this. How come Google’s just sneaking under the radar like they’re not doing ads? But yeah, I think it’s hilarious. The commercial is funny. I don’t think that’s how ads are going to work. But man, did they make me laugh with the delay and then the talking? Oh, so good. I was like, That’s so good. If ads were like this, that’d be horrible. Nobody would use it.

Emily: Yeah. I think we mentioned that earlier in the podcast. We were like, We still don’t quite know what the ads are going to look like, but hopefully it’s a good user experience. But yeah, I think that was a really well done ad. I’m guessing they probably did. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t know the exact release date of when opening I was going to do ads, but they sure got pretty close, which is great. Yeah, I guess they say ads are coming to AI. So that was a pretty safe bet. I mean, knowing that they’re going…

Jeremy: So yeah, that was- But this is definitely in response to OpenAI talking about ads, which Sam Altman said they would only do out of desperation, and now they’re doing ads. And now Claude saying they’re never doing ads, which is crazy to me to be like, well, I guess they didn’t say they’re never doing it. But if you start doing ads after this, you’re going to be ripped apart.

Emily: Yeah. I mean, the app, so they got themselves in a box there. But we’ll see. Overall, I like the ad.

Jeremy: Yeah, I thought it was cool.

Emily: So far, I like that one more than the OpenAI one.

Jeremy: Got it. But the overall, the unique selling point here is just that we don’t have ads. I don’t know if that’s going to be enough to get people to use Claude, but still interesting. If I used a different AI platform and it worked like how the dude is saying it in here, I wouldn’t use it.

Emily: Right.

Jeremy: Sure. Cool. Then we’ll look at Gemini. I didn’t see this one, but we’ll just watch it.

Emily: I mean, best ad. Google always gets it. I’m such a sucker for Google ads.

Jeremy: I think they always play it right.

Emily: Oh, my God. It’s so good, and it shows what it does.

Jeremy: Yeah, it shows what it does.

Emily: That’s so cool. I think for your average user who’s watching the Super Bowl, your average person probably can’t even tell you what an LLM is, obviously. What people I feel like the most common folk is using it the most is image generation. I thought that they played on the hard strings there of moving. Oh, so good.

Jeremy: I thought it was the best ad, too. I really like that they just showed what to do with it. Back to your point where people, they feel behind, what can I do with it? Here, it’s like, visualize my garden. It had it pull up old photos showing that it connects with the Google products and stuff. I just feel that they nailed it if I had never used AI before, and now I’m like, I’m going to go have it decorate this room or something, and then it’ll probably be able to show products. So not that the other ones were misses, but- And I will say the other one’s I think they probably had different target audiences, too.

Emily: I think somebody who’s using Anthropic, Claude and Gemini are different people, I think. I think your more common user is probably… I think right now, GBT is the most used, if I’m not mistaken. Maybe I am. Maybe it is Gemini now.

Jeremy: I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s Gemini. I think I heard something that Gemini was 40% or something.

Emily: I just heard this weekend, I was with someone who was a nurse, and she referred to using GPT. So that was interesting because it’s like that. I feel like they were first, and that’s the most well known.

Jeremy: Well, people think of ChatGPT as like, that’s the AI product.

Emily: That is what an LL… Yeah, that’s what AI is.

Jeremy: People are like, I’m going to Gemini that.

Emily: Exactly. So I just feel like Amphrodite’s Target might be a little bit different. I guess to you, a more sophisticated user, someone who’s definitely more into vibe coding using. For sure. Or businesses, because they really lean in on the privacy element.

Jeremy: That’s an interesting point, though, because you said, were you Were you saying that Claude and Anthropic were more for vibe coding? Yeah. But think about the ads now. That’s funny because then OpenAI goes after vibe coding with codex, and then literally Anthropic goes after OpenAI with making fun of their ads. I didn’t even realize it was shots fired in both directions, so you just said that.

Emily: Yeah, you’re right. I put that together, too. At least that’s how they’ve traditionally marketed themselves.

Jeremy: And then Google’s like, Hey, this is just how you use our AI product. I think they came out the winner, in my opinion. I think that’s what you I do, too.

Emily: Yeah, I think we need to just get this transcript and that’s a post, because I think that is really insightful between those three.

Jeremy: I’m sure everybody’s like, Yeah, we all knew that. We were like, Boy. I didn’t notice that until you just mentioned that.

Emily: Yeah, but…

Jeremy: And there might There might have been more AI commercials.

Emily: There were some more- From different companies.

Jeremy: I just didn’t- Yeah, it was pretty much all AI, weight loss. Yeah. Oh, yeah, the GLP ones.

Emily: It was heavy on that.

Jeremy: Which was stacked with celebrities. They must have paid a billion dollars for that ad.

Emily: Oh, My gosh. It was insane. Yeah. Like, T. Thompson was there. I was like, he’s on GLP ones? He’s looked the same for years. I don’t know. But yeah, and no Dorito commercial.

Jeremy: Oh, yeah. Interesting.

Emily: Pretty sad about that. But my Personal fave. Got to give it to Pringles and Sabrina.

Jeremy: At least the faves that I’ve seen so far. With the guy or whatever. Perfect man. I didn’t see I had to put my daughter to sleep, but I laughed at the… What was it? Benson Boon and Ben Stiller ads, but they were really short.

Emily: I haven’t seen that one yet.

Jeremy: I forget what it was even for. I can’t even remember. Let me do a quick Google search. Ben Stiller commercial. It was for Well, I can’t even find out what it’s for. Oh, Instacart.

Emily: Okay.

Jeremy: It was pretty funny.

Emily: Yeah, I got to watch more of them.

Jeremy: Hey, at least you don’t have to say I’m going to bard that. Remember before Gemini, it was called Bard?

Emily: That was so bad.

Jeremy: That was really bad. That was a real bad start. But we could Google the win for the Super Bowl, so that’s good. But Bard wasn’t great. Well, cool. And that’s the Click Brief podcast for January, 2026. This episode was edited by Aja Blue and produced by Emily Anderson and me, Jeremy Packee.