The barrier to entry just dropped to zero. If you have an idea and a keyboard, you are now a creative agency.
Inspiration: The death of the $500 web banner and my friends becoming video game characters.
Let’s have an honest conversation about the first wave of AI image generators.
Tools like the original Nano Banana (and Midjourney v5) were amazing… for memes. They were incredible party tricks.
But let’s be real: they were slot machines. You pulled the lever, wrote a prompt, and hoped for a good result.
For commercial work, they were not sufficient.
The text rendering was poor. It looked like alien hieroglyphics, or generated with different fonts.
The control was zero. You couldn’t edit just the background without destroying the model’s face.
Consistency was impossible. You couldn’t get the same character in two different poses.
It was a toy for Reddit, not a tool for commercial use.
The “Pro” Leap: From Slot Machine to Photoshop Killer
This changes now.
The new Nano Banana Pro (built on Google’s Gemini 3 architecture) isn’t just an incremental update. It’s a fundamental paradigm shift in utility.
It solves the biggest blockers to commercial AI adoption: Text and Consistency.
To prove it, I didn’t just make cool pictures. I put it to work.
Stance Experiment (Commercial Proof)
I love working with Stance socks. So I used a sample asset as my guinea pig.
I didn’t just ask for a cool edit of the text.
Do you want to know what I did?
Simply, “to generate a variant of the existing banner, following branding”.
The result wasn’t just a cool image. It was a finished ad.
The AI understood the brand voice. It rendered the headline text perfectly.
Below, you will see the reference image which I provided as the starting point.
Not necessarily a simple picture, with a lot of items and fairly close text.
Now, look at the magic Nano Banana Pro created in the first run.
Are you seeing what I am seeing?
With a single prompt, it has generated on-brand banners with clear text and on-brand elements.
While this was just a mockup, in a real-world scenario, this would eliminate the need to come up with a creative brief, send it over to a designer, go through countless iterations, to end up with something somewhat similar.
That’s value right there, and I am not surprised Google is one of the first brands to monetize AI.
The “Persona” Breakthrough (My Favourite Use Case)
This is the holy grail.
The biggest problem with AI has always been: “Keep the face, change the scene.”
Nano Banana Pro finally nailed it.
It can now lock onto a persona’s likeness.
Experiment 1: Uğurcan as a WW2 Soldier
I had a few photos of my best friends from a night out.
I fed them into the model and asked to put us in a soldier’s memory from WW2, to see how the band of brothers would look in a parallel universe.
Here is the reference image:
The lighting, the grain, the uniform—everything was perfect. But crucially, it was undeniably us.
Super cool! Isn’t it?!
Then, I was like, “how about a Star Wars theme?”
Assuming it might just a planet or two in the background.
But, no…
Check that out!
Not only it changed the bar into a Star Wars theme (including our drinks), it also picked personas for all of us, between a pilot, a bounty hunter, and a Jedi.
Amazing, right?
I wondered if this was a new trick Nano Banana now-Pro learned.
So, I tried to replicate that with a World of Warcraft theme.
Insert magic…
IT PICKED CLASSES FOR US!
The funny part is, we also tease our friend on the left as Gimli due to his strong facial features.
Incredible work…
Was this a one-off?
Let’s try the Team Fortress 2 Theme next.
It’s a relatively older game. So, I wonder what it does…
The results blew my mind!
Once again, with anothe hilarious detail that my friend on the left did in fact play the Spy class.
Now, it was time for the ultimate test.
The theme that many of us are familiar with.
Alright Nano Banana -clearly- Pro… Let’s try Grand Theft Auto Theme, with a little tweak of making it a cover image.
Then…
Are you seeing this?!
This is mind-blowing stuff.
None of us had the design skills to come up with something remotely close to this.
Yet, with one click, we generated a lovely asset that we all loved (one can argue that it even strengthened our bond through imagination).
Questioning if this trio had some sort of magic compatibility, I wanted to try with another asset.
Here is the reference image.
Yet another lovely memory, where we celebrate earning our Canadian citizenship.
(Fun fact: we studied for the exam together and applied together to support each other during the process).
So, let’s try this Grand Theft Auto theme cover trick once again, to see if the magic of Nano Banana Pro persists.
Then…
Not only it produced an incredible result, it understood the concept of the image and generated the variant based on it.
Canadian Eh-Dition?!
With objects from the reference image, and a script added?
This is something else…
The Death of the “Tech Stack”
Before this, you needed a stack to do this:
Midjourney for the base image.
Photoshop to fix the weird hands.
Canva to add the text.
Magnific to upscale it.
Nano Banana Pro is now the entire stack. It removes the friction between “Idea” and “Asset.”
This is dangerous (in a good way). The “idea guy” is no longer useless. If you have taste, you have the skills. The technical barrier of “learning the software” is gone.
The Next Frontier: Video
We are right at the edge of the cliff for video.
Nano Banana Pro is already plugging into video models (I believe new version of Veo was also released at the same time).
The static images we are making today are the storyboards for tomorrow’s videos.
Next year, we won’t be making banners. We will be prompting: “Create a 30-second TV spot for Stance, featuring my friend dunking a basketball in a 1990s Nike commercial style.”
And it will just… happen.
Adapt or Perish
Here is my final take.
Creative agencies are still charging $5,000 for what this tool does for $0.05. The arbitrage window is closing fast.
Stop treating this as a novelty. It is the new baseline for digital literacy.
If you have an idea and a keyboard, you are now a creative agency. Act like it.