The Daily Carnage

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

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AI Slowdown?

The race waits for no one.

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The Right Creator Is Hiding in Plain Sight

SEPTEMBER 23, 2026

Finding influencers sounds easy until you actually have to find the right one.

Follower count can give you a starting point, but it doesn’t tell you whether a creator’s audience overlaps with yours, whether people actually engage with their content, or whether they’re a natural fit for your brand. And with more brands investing in creator marketing, finding someone who can genuinely connect with your audience matters more than finding the biggest account in the category.

Before reaching out, look beyond the follower count:

Start with your campaign goal and define what you need the creator to deliver.
Look at who their audience actually is and whether it overlaps with yours.
Check engagement and the quality of conversations around their content.
Use social listening to see how people talk about the creator outside their own posts.
Look at their previous brand partnerships for potential conflicts or mismatches.
Check for suspicious engagement or inflated metrics before signing anything.
Don’t overlook your own brand advocates. Some of your most natural creators may already be in your audience.

The biggest creator isn’t necessarily the one your brand needs. Fit is doing a lot more work than follower count.

Head to Dash Social for more.

The Clickless Strategy

SEPTEMBER 22, 2026

Remember when every piece of content had one job: get the click?

That playbook is getting harder to rely on. AI search answers more questions without sending people to a website, while social platforms often favor content that keeps users on the platform. That makes zero-click marketing less about driving an immediate visit and more about delivering enough value that people remember who gave it to them. Semrush defines zero-click marketing as content that provides standalone value without requiring users to click somewhere else.

Try building content that:

Answers the question completely instead of saving the useful part for the CTA.
Gives each platform a reason to exist rather than reposting the same link everywhere.
Focuses on the topics, questions, and problems your audience already cares about.
Removes the CTA and link as a test: does the content still stand on its own?
Measures branded search, engagement, AI visibility, and direct audience feedback alongside clicks.
Treats social posts, newsletters, and other “non-click” channels as places to build familiarity and trust.

A click is easy to count. Being useful enough to be remembered is harder — and may be the more important job.

Head to Semrush for more.

Reddit Is Part of the Search

SEPTEMBER 21, 2026

Reddit isn’t just a place to see what people are saying about your brand anymore. It’s increasingly becoming part of how people search, research products, and make purchase decisions.

Reddit threads can show up in Google, get pulled into AI-generated answers, and stay discoverable for months or even years. That means some of the information shaping how people perceive your brand may live somewhere you don’t control.

Here’s how to make Reddit part of your search strategy:

Monitor your brand, products, competitors, and category on Reddit.
Search commercial queries with “Reddit” to see which conversations are surfacing.
Pay attention to the questions, complaints, comparisons, and terminology customers actually use.
Identify high-value threads that rank for questions your potential customers are asking.
Participate where it makes sense by answering questions and providing genuine expertise.
Use Reddit conversations to inform your broader SEO, content, and messaging strategy.
Keep investing in owned content, too. Reddit should complement your search strategy, not replace it.

The goal isn’t to manufacture positive conversations about your brand. It’s to understand and participate in the conversations that are already influencing search.

Head to Carney for more.

Launch the Problem, Not the AI

SEPTEMBER 18, 2026

Another day, another AI feature.

As AI becomes standard across software, simply calling something “AI-powered” isn’t much of a differentiator anymore. The real challenge is getting customers to understand what a new feature actually does for them, trust it enough to try it, and see enough value to keep using it.

That means a strong launch needs to start well before the feature hits the product page, with clear positioning around the customer problem, the workflow it improves, and the value it creates.

A stronger AI launch starts with the customer:

Lead with the problem the feature solves, not the technology behind it.
Show exactly where it fits into an existing workflow.
Build trust by addressing questions around data, security, accuracy, and control.
Use demos, guides, and customer stories to make unfamiliar technology feel familiar.
Measure what happens after launch, from first use to repeat adoption and retention.

The feature may be powered by AI, but that doesn’t need to be the headline. When AI becomes standard, the way you explain its value becomes part of the product experience.

Head to Carney for more.

AI Has Cultural Defaults

SEPTEMBER 16, 2026

AI might feel universal, but its answers aren’t always culturally neutral.

Ask an AI the same question in different languages or cultural contexts, and you may get surprisingly different answers. That’s because AI systems can pick up on cultural assumptions, preferences, and norms that aren’t always obvious to the person using them.

For UX teams, that matters. A product can technically work across markets while still feeling very different to different users.

Keep cultural context in mind when designing AI experiences:

Test prompts and outputs across different languages and regions.
Don’t assume a response that feels “normal” to one audience will feel the same everywhere.
Look for hidden assumptions in recommendations, rankings, examples, and defaults.
Give users enough context or control to understand why an AI system responded a certain way.
Treat localization as more than translating the interface.

The goal isn’t to make AI completely culture-free. It’s to recognize where culture is shaping the experience — and design for it intentionally.

Head to UX Collective for more.

What’s Missing From The Search Results?

SEPTEMBER 15, 2026

There’s a lot of SEO content out there saying roughly the same thing. And if your next article is just a slightly different version of what already ranks, you’re adding another page to an already crowded conversation.

The idea behind Information Gain is simple: content has more value when it brings something new to the table. That could mean original research, first-party data, hands-on experience, unique analysis, or useful visuals that help people understand something they couldn’t get from the other results. Hobo’s take on the concept suggests that SEO teams should spend less time asking, “How can we make this look like the top results?” and more time asking, “What are the top results missing?”

So how can you add more information gain to your content?

Bring your own data: Use surveys, customer insights, experiments, or proprietary research instead of relying entirely on existing sources.
Add actual expertise: Share observations and lessons that come from doing the work, not just researching it.
Create original visuals: Diagrams, charts, screenshots, and other useful assets can make your content more than a wall of text.
Find the gap: Study the existing results and identify what they consistently fail to answer.
Stay relevant: Being different isn’t enough. Your new information still needs to answer the searcher’s actual question.
Stop rewriting the SERP: If the only thing you’re adding is a new way to say what everyone else already said, there probably isn’t much new value there.

The goal isn’t to make your content different for the sake of being different. It’s to give people a reason to choose your page after they’ve already seen everything else.

Head to Hobo for the full breakdown.

What To Know Before Rebranding

SEPTEMBER 14, 2026

A brand can be doing perfectly fine and still start to feel a little… tired. Maybe the business has evolved, the messaging hasn’t kept up, or the visual identity is starting to look a little too familiar. And when that happens, the instinct can be to throw everything out and start over.

But a full rebrand isn’t always the answer. Sometimes, the brand already has plenty of recognition and equity worth keeping. The better move might be figuring out what feels outdated, what still works, and where a few intentional changes could make the whole thing feel more relevant.

So where should you start?

Audit the brand: Look across your website, social, ads, sales materials, and other customer touchpoints. Find what feels outdated or inconsistent.
Ask your audience: Compare how your team describes the brand with how customers actually see it. The gaps can be telling.
Protect recognition: Identify the colors, type, symbols, or other elements people already associate with you before changing them.
Revisit the messaging: Your logo might be fine. Your three-year-old homepage headline might be the real problem.
Check accessibility: Test color contrast, typography, and how the refreshed identity works across different devices and contexts.
Build a system: Update templates, guidelines, social assets, presentations, and other places where the brand actually shows up.
Test before launch: Put the new identity in front of people outside the project and see if they still recognize it.

A refresh should make the brand feel more current without making people wonder if they’re looking at the right company.

Head to Carney for the full breakdown.

A Few Things Worth Trying In Google Ads

SEPTEMBER 11, 2026

If you’re not sure what to test next in Google Ads, the answer probably isn’t “change everything and hope for the best.”

WordStream’s list of 21 experiment ideas breaks testing down by what’s actually happening in your account — whether you’re trying to scale, fix declining performance, improve conversion rates, or simply don’t have enough data yet.

A few places to start:

Need more volume? Test budget increases, new match types, AI Max, or expanded geotargeting.
Getting clicks but not conversions? Look at search intent and experiment with messaging that better matches what people actually want.
Performance getting stale? Refresh ad copy using your best-performing themes, customer questions, reviews, and competitor messaging.
Need more awareness? Test campaigns higher up the funnel instead of expecting Search to do everything.
Want to understand the competition? Use Auction Insights to spot changes in impression share and competitive pressure.

The important part is to test one meaningful variable at a time and let the data tell you what deserves more investment.

Head to WordStream for 21 ideas to add to your testing list.

Look Beyond The Conversion

SEPTEMBER 10, 2026

For fintech marketers, getting someone to sign up is only the beginning.

An application, account opening, or card activation can tell you that someone converted, but it doesn’t tell you whether that customer actually became valuable. As fintech companies mature, marketers need to look further down the customer journey and understand what happens after that first action.

So what should marketers be measuring?

Activation: Track whether new customers actually start using the product.
Retention: Look at which acquisition sources bring in customers who stick around.
Lifetime value: Connect acquisition costs to the revenue a customer is expected to generate over time.
Product usage: Bring CRM and product data into your marketing measurement.
Customer stages: Build campaigns around what customers need after acquisition, not just what gets them through the door.

A conversion is a starting point, not the finish line. The better question isn’t just “Did they sign up?” It’s “What happened next?”

Head to Carney for the full scoop.

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