The Daily Carnage

The savvy marketer's hub for industry news, insights, resources, and culture.

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Is Rainbow Capitalism Dead? 🌈

Brands scale back support.

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Zoom In

Fotografiska’s photography museum in Stockholm is running a clever campaign to get folks in the door.

They’ve shrunken famous images by Elliot Erwitt to a nearly illegible (read: mobile) size across OOH spots, which is generating a lot of squinting.

The tagline is “Photography deserves more than your feed.”

It’s a great stunt to assert that art should be experienced at full scale, because a lot nuance is lost to thumbnails and grids.

How Curious

NPR’s new initiative, “For your right to be curious,” transforms the N‑P‑R logo into fundamental journalism vocab like “how,” “who,” and “why.” They’ve even changed the signage at headquarters.

The campaign appears across billboards in major cities, as well as social, and pairs these questions with real listener queries that NPR journalism aims to answer.

According to NPR, the effort is a public commitment to independent journalism that encourages inquiry at a time when the network has faced political and funding pressures.

SOMO Cancels Anti-Semitism Campaign

In NYC, an antisemitism awareness campaign by JewBelong was pulled mid-run after outdoor advertising partner SOMO cancelled the taxi rooftop ads, which had been scheduled to appear on about 4,000 Manhattan cabs through March 10.

The campaign featured the message, “Totally willing to hide my Jewish star for a free bus ride.”

According to JewBelong, SOMO was concerned that the creative was interpreted as taking aim at a free bus policy backed by NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. But JewBelong says there was no reference to him in the ads.

JewBelong declined to update the copy and the taxi ads were pulled without its consent. For now, static billboards with alternative messages are planned to continue in other boroughs.

Urn Up The Volume

Spotify has teamed up with Liquid Death to launch the Eternal Playlist Urn, a limited-edition Bluetooth speaker/cremation urn.

Only 150 units were released at $495 each, but beyond the collectible, Spotify launched an “Eternal Playlist” generator that creates a custom playlist based on your answers to morbid prompts.

Can’t beat a campaign with dark humor, scarcity, personalization, social sharing, and good old shock value.

Sick Truth

UK’s Channel 4 is making quite the splash about Britain’s ongoing sewage scandal in order to promote its factual drama “Dirty Business.”

At London’s South Bank, the broadcaster’s in-house creative team, 4Creative, alongside collaborators including Glue Society and Biscuit Filmworks, unveiled The Fountain of Filth: an installation of sculptures vomiting murky brown water.

Designed to mirror real accounts from people who believe they have been made ill by exposure to polluted rivers and seas, the installation directs passersby via QR code to testimonies and stories about the human impact behind decades of untreated sewage entering the environment.

Vids or It Didn’t Happen

During the Olympics, Liquid Death aired an AI-slopified commercial in which a figure skater turns into a red-eyed demon.

Sadly, we can’t show you the spot, because it doesn’t exist online and it never will. You literally had to be there.

The brand rightly thought viewers would, upon failing to find it on the Internet, believe it to be a collective fever dream. Such is life in 2026.

Liquid Death told AdAge that it was a one-time use of AI to, ultimately, critique AI…and freak everyone out. Just thought you should know.

Pretty G-G-Great

Another day, another jingle for ya.

Frosted Flakes is teaming up with rapper J.I.D. in a new campaign that reimagines the classic ‘90s “Hey Tony” jingle (sorry that’s in your head until EOD now) into a full-length hype song. And yes, it all comes with a limited-edition cereal box and merch.

The track will debut at the “Day Ones” Bowl Game on February 22, where J.I.D will perform live and community youth teams will compete in 7×7 football, with donations from Kellogg’s Mission Tiger™ supporting local sports programs.

Whoa, Baby

Why are moms on TikTok throwing away their Frida baby gear?

Well, some controversial campaign slogans and packaging copy have resurfaced on social media, drawing accusations that the brand is in the business of sexualizing babies.

But Frida defends its approach as consistent from the jump as a humorous, candid commentary on the “messy realities” of parenting.

It just so happens that Frida’s current campaign features a taboo-busting Mardi-Gras float that looks like… well, this.

Biting Back

Tony’s Chocolonely has launched its first global television campaign, “There’s Fight in Every Bite.”

The 30-second commercial is airing in the UK and showcases two fictional wrestlers: Tony versus X-ploitation, who represents the brand’s mission of fighting injustice in the cocoa industry.

Made by House of Oddities and funded in part by Sky’s Zero Footprint Fund, the campaign is Tony’s biggest 360° initiative yet, spanning TV, digital, social, experiential, and PR channels.

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