The Click Brief - November 2025

Jeremy Packee and Emily Anderson break down November’s biggest developments in AI creative, unified ad platforms, and AI-assisted shopping. Google’s launch of Gemini 3 and its high-fidelity image model Nano Banana Pro marks a major leap in AI-generated production assets. Amazon announced a unified Ads + DSP console alongside new AI creative agents, and ChatGPT stepped directly into the purchase journey with personalized, agentic shopping research. They also cover Performance Max expanding into Waze inventory for store-focused campaigns. Follow The Click Brief for fast, no-fluff performance marketing updates every month.

Episode Highlights

• Google Gemini 3 + Nano Banana Pro
  • High-fidelity image generation now produces accurate text, consistent characters, and branded-quality visuals.
  • Direct exports to Sheets/Slides strengthen workflow automation for marketers.
  • A meaningful creative leap that positions Gemini as a real competitor to ChatGPT for production use.
• Amazon Unifies Ads + DSP + Adds AI Creative Tools
  • Sponsored Ads and DSP now live in a single campaign manager, lowering barriers to programmatic buying.
  • New Ads Agent and Creative Agent generate product and lifestyle imagery, though quality still varies.
  • Expect more AI-generated assets across Amazon; realism and accuracy will be key brand differentiators.
• ChatGPT Shopping Research Assistant
  • New agentic shopping flow asks clarifying questions and compares real-time product specs and pricing.
  • Signals how ChatGPT may integrate ads in early 2026.
  • Strong reminder to maintain complete, accurate product data and imagery.
• Performance Max Extends to Waze
  • Store-focused PMax campaigns can now serve in Waze for high-intent navigational and “near me” searches.
  • Strong win for brick-and-mortar advertisers capturing real-time local demand.

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

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

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 and paid media.

Jeremy: I’m Jeremy Packee here with Emily Anderson, bringing you the top updates from November that could shake up your strategy heading into the New year.

Emily: Besides Black Friday and Cyber Monday, November was actually a slower month for updates. Here’s what’s ahead. Google’s new Gemini three and Nana Banana Pro pushing AI creative into true production. Amazon unifying ads and DSP with new AI agents in a single console, and ChatGPT stepping into the shopping journey with personalized buyer guides. And that’s just the start.

Jeremy: Starting off with the high impact updates. So this is probably, to me, one of the biggest updates of the month. It was like the only one that really stuck out to me is like, whoa, this is like a big deal. And that is Google releasing Gemini three and Nano Banana Pro. And that happened on November 18th. Google launched Gemini three and its specialized image model, Nano Banana Pro. I think one of the big stars here is Nano Banana Pro, which helps solve the uncanny valley of AI by generating high fidelity visuals, accurate text rendering, and consistent characters across different scenes. I personally think it’s pretty amazing. Um, it’s also just appearing to be much more accurate and capable than previous models. And I also really love the, like, uh, compatibility with other Google products.

Emily: This this update really rocked my world. I for the first time, I had been traditionally, uh, exclusive ChatGPT user I just felt like I needed to pick one and get comfortable with it and use that. So I have a ChatGPT Pro account that I use daily. However, once this update came out and just a few other things Like Jeremy, you mentioned with the compatibility between Gmail and Google, I am strongly considering switching over to Gemini just because the capabilities, especially with the image creation, are just far, far ahead of anything in my opinion that ChatGPT is doing.

Jeremy: I’m using both right now, so like I still feel more comfortable sometimes with text, just like pure text outputs on on ChatGPT you know I pay for ChatGPT, I love it. Um, I think they’re probably going to really start to, uh, you know, push innovation there even more than they already have. But yeah, this this is a cool model Gemini suite. Like, you can do a lot of stuff. I feel like I’m just starting to tap in to what it can do. But one thing that I love is just like, you know, export to sheets or export to slides, like those features that come right up in, uh, Gemini three. I feel like you’ve used Nano Banana Pro a bit more than I have. I’ve just messed with it to, to do some, like, uh, some random, like, basketball images and funny stuff with Yanis. You know the potential trade. And I’ve made like some funny kind of meme images with it. And I’ve been very impressed with that.

Jeremy: Um but just based on the quality of it and how realistic everything looks like, there’s no doubt that people are and are going to use it for ads. Like it just makes sense.

Emily: Yeah, I haven’t used it for any work cases yet. Um, I am currently. I was talking to Jeremy right before we jumped on, but I do the granular holiday party game, so I have been using Nana Banana Pro to create my slides for that, and it is pretty incredible. It produced one image. I can’t say it because I can’t give away the theme for my game yet to Jeremy, but it created. It created one image that absolutely blew my mind. My only beef with it right now, and I’m sure this is going to change, is that once you get the slide created, you can’t edit the slide. It would be awesome if you could edit the elements of the slide, like, you can’t do that in ChatGPT either, but you can do that with Canva AI, which is pretty nice because it’ll shoot you an output and then you can edit the boxes, the text, It will be sweet when Nana. Banana. Nano banana. I always say the word name.

Jeremy: I love it, great name.

Emily: I love the name. I just.

Jeremy: Doesn’t feel like a Google name, but I yeah, it.

Emily: Doesn’t. But yeah, um, yeah, I’m slipping on bananas every time I try to say the name, but um, once you can do that, it’s going to be a game changer. I’m not a designer by any means, but this kind of makes it look like I kind of have a little bit of a design eye, um, which is going to be a powerful tool. It can’t wait till we can update like a, you know, a brand guideline deck and like, help us make, you know, all of the decks we make for clients. Like, I spent a lot of time just formatting and if something like this could take that out and I could just provide the data and the metrics, that will be a huge.

Jeremy: Huge, a huge pain point when putting stuff together like that. So that’s a that’s a really good point. Uh, one thing I’ve, I’ve seen people use this just, you know, being on TikTok and YouTube, like I’ve seen people do some pretty amazing, like visuals, like build this interactive table or, you know, make this mini website or make this app or make this game. So it really feels like the barriers to entry for making like some of these products or making something that’s like that just feels branded and professional versus even just putting something in a Google sheet. Right? You can put something in a Google Sheet and have your formulas and take a look, you know, kind of pretty in there. Um, but you can also make like a little website or a little app, um, which is just really cool. I think there’s going to be a lot of stuff done with this, and I’m sure a lot of stuff in the internet we already see, um, is done with this and it’ll be brought into Google ads.

Jeremy: You know, there’s already connectivity between that. So, you know, Google Ads is going to benefit from all these features. Um, you know, I think it’s it’s a good thing. Uh, I like it. All right. Next, Amazon Ads shows a unified council and debuts AI tools. So ads agent and creative agent. So brief summary. At Amazon’s Unbox 2025 event, Amazon announced that there was going to be a unified campaign manager, so it was going to be merging all the Amazon Ads console and the Amazon DSP console into one platform. Um, I didn’t attend this event, but obviously that’s pretty interesting that they’d be bringing those together into one platform, especially if it’s going to be not as hard to get into the DSP, um, and be able to just buy those ads. So that’s, uh, pretty neat. Um, they also introduced, as you know, is every other platform from Reddit to Snapchat, TikTok, you know, Facebook, Google, um, these AI powered assistants and creative agents to basically make content.

Jeremy: I played with some of these. It’s definitely better than, uh, what I’ve seen in the past from Amazon. Um, like, I tried to just basically put, uh, this treadmill that we sell. I tried to, like, have it put like a woman, like, running on the treadmill. And it did a pretty good job. But you could still tell it was AI. It was just like the angles weren’t, like, quite right. But it does give me, you know, hope that, uh, maybe we’ll be able to do this in the in your future. Um, you know, creating basically images or even videos that could maybe be usable. Uh, that would be cool. So I don’t know, what are your thoughts on that, Emily?

Emily: So I gotta share because I got a text from I have a group chat with my college friends, and today one of my friends. I’m the only one that works in paid advertising. A couple of friends that work in, like, organic social. But from this one friend, she’s a psychologist, so like, no marketing background. Yeah, she texts the group. Anyone else getting belligerent this holiday season about the excessive misuse of AI in Amazon pictures?

Jeremy: Oh yeah.

Emily: So, like.

Jeremy: I feel like they automatically do it sometimes. I’ve seen bad ones. I’ve seen the garbage can look like it’s the size of a pencil, like in a living room. And I’m like, oh, somebody did that one wrong.

Emily: Yeah. So to your point, like with more and more of this becoming readily available and like you’re looking at it and you’re like, ah, that’s not good. That looks like AI slap.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily: There’s like probably ten other people that are like good enough, like we’re just gonna run with it. Um, so pretty interesting. And like that’s clearly frustrating her. And I think that like consumers are going to reach probably a limit of that. I know I’m sick of the amount of like AI slop I see across the internet already, so I just feel like they have to tread lightly. But like they also needed to do this to enter into the race because every other platform is offering it.

Jeremy: Right. And they had like features like this before, just, you know, they’re basically trying to make it so that, you know, you and I if we’re not like, classic designers could go in there and be like, hey, we need to we need a Christmas, you know, themed image. Can we do this? And I think we’re at a point where you can do that. Like, I think there’s there’s usable images, but anytime it’s like we’re going to take this random stock image that you have and we’re going to try to put a person on it or make a video out of it. It’s like impressive what it does, but I would still never use it. I’m like, oh like nice try. That was like cool. That like it’s close. And maybe one day, um, you’ll be able to do it and it’s going to come down to probably you having good images and maybe reference video and stuff like that, but they’re definitely trying to make it better. And, you know, maybe it’ll be usable.

Jeremy: I’m sure for some brands it is. If you’re just like, I don’t know, selling a pack of pencils and you’re like, I need this pack of pencils to be like in a classroom. You know, in this image. I bet I could do that. Okay. But if you’re trying to say, like, hey, I want to have a video of, like, a woman running on this treadmill, and all you have is an image of a treadmill that’s not there yet. Cool. Uh, next update. So ChatGPT launched Shopping Research, um, which is basically making ChatGPT enter the purchase journey. So this is an Agentic shopping assistant that asks clarifying questions to build personalized buyers guides using real time data on price and specs. I tested this one time. I thought it was like, pretty neat that it’s like basically you can click on something and then it kind of like asks you questions on what you know, and then you can kind of answer that and it gives you like a recommended product.

Jeremy: Um, you know, maybe this turns into.

Jeremy: You adds in in January or whenever, you know ChatGPT is expected to launch their sort of ad product, but I thought it was neat. Um, I just liked that it’s tried to get more answers out of you instead of me being like, okay, and I like it to be like this, or I want it to be good for, I don’t know, the snow. It kind of seemed like it was trying to really find the best product.

Emily: That’s a really good user journey that I think we’ll see more and more of, I think, I don’t know, it’s probably not on November. It might be on December’s update, but meta just released something similarly, um, with FAQs and more of like a chat bot, um, trying to find products. So yeah, I think this is just a step in the direction of that. They’re eventually going to offer ads. I also tried to prompt this to get it to serve to me. Um, and I couldn’t. So maybe it’s just out on a couple. Oh, interesting. Probably. It probably depends. Or maybe, you know, this was. I tried it, you know.

Jeremy: Did you type in, like, I want to buy glasses or something or.

Emily: No, I was, I was trying to shop for, shoes for my son. Got it. So his first shoes. So I was trying to like be like, okay, well one how do I figure out his size? And then two, like what brands are recommended, you know, yada yada. Um, and I couldn’t get it to prompt. Maybe that was too niche though to like maybe if I did like I want to buy glasses would be more general, but.

Jeremy: I’m going to try it right now. I want to.

Emily: Get the.

Jeremy: Kids glasses.

Emily: Shoes. Yeah. Let’s try here. So Jeremy just prompted ChatGPT.

Jeremy: You can also I saw it pop up, but also like, you know how you used to pick, um, like what model you wanted to use. You can just pick shopping research from there and, and like type it in.

Emily: So there you go. And so you’re referring to just for listeners, the plus sign at the bottom of the.

Jeremy: Yeah exactly.

Emily: You can click uh shopping research which I actually didn’t click that.

Jeremy: It did. It did show up when it was new though. Like I saw it in there and I thought that was like pretty neat. But yeah, I wrote I want to buy glasses in the shopping assistant and it’s thinking, we’ll see what it does. It’s kind of thinking along a while.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: Says connecting to app. Starting shopping. Research. So yeah.

Emily: This is. There you go.

Jeremy: So I didn’t put in my budget like oh yeah my budget.

Emily: Jeremy like basically multiple choice question. You know what his budget range is now another multiple choice question for his purpose. That is pretty cool. Okay. Yeah I haven’t seen that. But that does feel like a more general a personalized experience I should say.

Jeremy: So just imagine when this goes into ads though.

Emily: And it’s going.

Jeremy: To be your product data better be on point. Yeah. If you don’t have this information in there, maybe it can assume by just like, I don’t know, some of the text on the landing page or like, like literally looking at the images. But I wouldn’t rely on that. Like I would make sure, you know, that you have this type of information in there, you know, from material to what it’s good for. Like all those things are going to be more and more important. And then we do have a couple updates, but I feel like the only other one to me that was worth kind of bringing up, and it’s a small one, is just the fact that, um, in pmax, uh, Google is extending the reach of performance max campaigns to the roads. So basically ways inventory is now integrated into pmax campaigns focused on store goals. So I don’t really use Waze. I used to sort of like many years ago, but I guess that’s like kind of neat, right?

Jeremy: You can have your like promoted Pin if somebody’s typing in, I don’t know, they want to go shopping or something. Maybe your ad will show up. And I think that’s neat. It doesn’t really affect me. Uh, any thoughts on that? Emily.

Emily: Yeah, I think it’s an awesome win for brick and mortar retail. I do have a couple clients that do run, uh, max campaigns geared for optimizing towards store traffic, and we’ve seen a lot of success from it. We do have to negate out like, their brand name, but otherwise you really hit on those near me searches. So let’s just say like your example from before, like you were advertising treadmills. If someone goes and types in treadmills near me, being able to pop on that is super valuable. Search. Because, you know, someone typing near me is likely looking to drive to that location and looking to drive, probably within the next day to make a purchase. Those are high value searches. So I think being on Waze or I think, isn’t it? I feel like I’ve heard people call it was before.

Jeremy: Oh, really? I haven’t heard.

Emily: That. I don’t know. I feel like I heard my dad call it that or something. That makes sense. Was it?

Jeremy: That’s the bad way to say it.

Emily: It’s a bad way. Call the dad’s referred to it. Who I think are the most of the people on was. Anyway.

Jeremy: I feel like I used it like my friends would have me use Waze when we were in LA, and it would be like, go through this alley and you’ll get there faster. I feel like it used to be kind of like that. This was maybe even like Pre-google. It would just take nontraditional routes to get to places faster. Or maybe I’m like thinking of the wrong app, but I swear that’s how I used to use it.

Emily: I also think it was one of the first, like, map like tools to like, say, when cops were ahead.

Jeremy: Oh yeah.

Emily: I feel like that’s why I used it.

Jeremy: But that’s in Google Now does that too.

Emily: So I feel like that’s why I went back. And I also think Google Maps is like supreme compared to any other, uh, you know, Apple Maps or or Waze. So. So yeah, a really awesome update. Good to see. Um, yeah. But yeah, other than that, it was like a slower month we had.

Jeremy: I think it’s good.

Emily: Obviously we rallied with it.

Jeremy: No big changes.

Emily: Uh, yeah. For sure. You don’t want to, like, launch anything new right before like a Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And then I also think it’s, you know, we’re about to gear up for some big 2026 launches.

Jeremy: True. Emily, any parting words?

Emily: November. A little bit of a slower month, a couple big updates, but definitely looking forward to December. And then of course, seeing what gets released right off the bat in 2026, 2025 was a year like no other. So I cannot imagine the type of technology and the impact it’s going to have on digital marketing next year. I’m truly, really excited for it.

Jeremy: And that’s a quick, brief podcast for November 2025. This episode was edited by Aja Blue and produced by Emily Anderson and me, Jeremy Packee.