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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Eat Chicken, Do Crime

KFC Canada is promoting tax evasion this holiday season.

Since Canada won’t have a GST tax rebate this year, KFC’s “Tax Evasion Menu” will cover the tax itself for online and app orders.

A :30 spot from Courage features a shadowed and voice-altered Colonel Sanders encouraging viewers to visit ChickenTaxEvasion.com.

The campaign extends to mobile digital trucks that read “Commit Tax Evasion” parked outside of… banks.

Yay, a fun new search term for KFC’s SEO team.

Taylor ❤️ Travis

Congratulations to Taylor and Travis on the engagement!

Taylor Hayes and Travis Wickboldt, obviously.

Zola is borrowing some of the viral attention for the celebrity couple to highlight and elevate real customers in a new campaign called “Wedding of the Year.”

The brand is turning the couple’s Wisconsin wedding into a full-scale moment complete with Times Square billboards, subway takeovers, and a Netflix-debuting hero film.

All Soaped Up

Will 2026 be the year of the serialized microdrama? The market is projected to hit $11B globally.

Native has produced a 50-episode, mobile-first soap opera called “The Golden Pear Affair.”

The narrative will naturally promote Native’s Global Flavors with scent-inspired plot lines. Swoon!

The Claw!

Dave & Buster’s just dropped an $80 claw machine–inspired purse. Created with Chain, it even features a tiny sculptural claw charm suspended inside.

The launch ties into D&B’s viral Human Crane attraction, which is expanding to 112 locations nationwide. It’s OTT, just like this purse.

Put a Ring Pop on It

First, the Alex + Ani Polly Pocket collection. Now, this.

Brilliant Earth has launched a limited-edition capsule collection with Ring Pop, in which the colorful candies are reimagined as oversized gemstones set in 14-karat gold, hidden halo settings.

Y2K euphoria. It really takes you back to when your favorite flavor of anything was simply “blue.”

Ringing a Bell?

You know the iconic 1989 Hershey’s Kisses holiday ad? The one with the bells?

The brand recently transformed it into a multi-channel world for the Rockefeller Center tree lighting, featuring an LED-powered interactive mat (like the keyboard from “Big”) that lets visitors play the classic “Holiday Bells” melody themselves.

Naturally there is also influencer content, TikTok and Snapchat effects, SiriusXM integrations, Candy Crush rewards, and even a Lainey Wilson music video.

At a Moment’s Notice

Eurostar and DDB Paris are bringing back serendipity with “Unexpected Tickets.”

The campaign celebrates the reopening of the direct Amsterdam–London route. In an age when itineraries are exhaustively pre-planned, the work reframes spontaneity as a real luxury.

Using Eurostar Snap, the brand’s last-minute ticket service, the campaign hid disguised “tickets” inside everyday objects: a baguette that sends you to Paris, fish and chips that whisk you to London, a rented bike that takes you to Amsterdam.

Cardboard Box Pro

Whisker is selling an $899 “premium” box for your cat to fits-and-sits in.

It does come with the new Litter-Robot 5, but your cat won’t give AF about that.

The campaign comes with a 12-day social giveaway and partnerships with animal rescue organizations to help more cats get adopted.

Reuters Enters The Chat

Reuters’ first brand campaign in 175 years, “Pure News, Straight from the Source,” makes a timely case for why truth still matters.

Created with Gravity Road, the film uses cloudy water as its central metaphor to illustrate how misinformation muddies what we consume.

There’s an interesting and intentional choice to use AI here in order to showcase how easily imagery can be manipulated.

But of course, Reuters doesn’t use gen AI in its journalism, so the film pivots to unaltered footage captured by the organization’s 2,600 reporters across 200 locations.