The Daily Carnage

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

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Let’s Talk About Millennial Cringe

DECEMBER 8, 2023

What is millennial cringe, you ask reluctantly?

It’s just about anything millennials do that causes second-hand embarrassment in the youths. (Full disclosure, The Daily Carnage is a mostly millennial-run operation.) For example:

The millennial pause: When a millennial person briefly hesitates after pressing record on the self-facing camera and before speaking. To be fair, there used to be a delay, and we’re just playing it safe.

Millennial humor: There’s not one sense of humor that defines millennials, but Gen Z likes to rib us for the earnest, self-critical Internet persona popularized by Buzzfeed and CollegeHumor “back in the day.”

According to Meltwater, there was a 119% increase in mentions of millennial cringe this year, and the folks doing the talking are between 18 and 34. That’s right, millennials are kind of self-conscious right now.

The question is, can your brand speak to the growing anxiety that millennials feel about losing digital literacy?

While we’re on the topic, you should know by now that the laughing-crying emoji [redacted] is totally cringe, video boomerangs are ancient artifacts, landscape mode is out, and under no circumstances should you reference The Office, Friends, or Harry Potter in public.

Check out Meltwater for more.

YouTube’s Trending Topics of 2023 (US)

DECEMBER 6, 2023

YouTube is wrapping up the year with 10 major zeitgeist moments that shaped 2023, for better or worse. And if you had your head down this year and have no idea what some of these are, they’re linked for your edification:

Skibidi Toilet
Grimace Shake
Israel Palestine
Peaches (Bowser/Jack Black)
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Garten of Banban
Barbie (2023)
Peso Pluma
Artificial Intelligence
Flowers (Miley Cyrus)

Check out YouTube’s top songs and creators of 2023 on the blog.

How to Grow Your Personal LinkedIn Account

DECEMBER 5, 2023

Buffer’s Charu Mitra Dubey grew her LinkedIn account to over 42k followers with these fundamental tips:

Create a basic audience persona like you would for your brand. What are your targets’ industries, job titles, pain points, and interests?
Follow the 80-20 rule. Most of your content should be niche-specific, illuminating your area of expertise, while the remainder can be generic and engaging to a broader audience.
Be an early adopter of new LinkedIn features to increase your visibility and engagement.
Collect insights and inspiration in one place, manually or digitally, to reference later.
Study what works for other successful creators. What content structures, tones, engagement strategies, and headlines seem to get consistent attention?
Interact with people. Turn on post notifications, slide into DMs, leave genuine comments, and show real interest.

The Popularity Mirage

DECEMBER 4, 2023

Jason Keath from SocialFresh calls the popularity mirage “a marketer’s inclination to imitate popular or splashy brands with unrelatable advantages.”

You’ve probably seen the mirage. You wake up to an inbox full of newsletters detailing a marketing stunt that everyone in the office is already talking about. And you think, would it work for us?

Usually, those brands have a few key advantages:

Powerful resources like more money, brand awareness, celebrity, PR connections
An established audience or fandom
A unique business model that affects strategy

For instance, everyone was talking about Barbie in Q3, and rightly so. With a $150 million dollar budget, the top-selling toy in history, and no shortage of celebrity talent, their marketing team wasn’t exactly starting from square one.

Still, we saw a lot of underperforming imitations in the days that followed, because the popularity mirage is hard to resist.

Read Keath’s full blog at SocialFresh.

10 Gen Z Subcultures to Know

DECEMBER 3, 2023

We’re all friends here, so we can admit that there’s a lot of overlap (and hot air) when it comes to generational prognostication. But there’s nothing wrong with keeping a thumb on the pulse of the zeitgeist. So, here it goes, 10 subcultures to know, based on on survey data.

Third-culture kids: Young adults raised in a culture other than that of their parents.
Culinary root remixers: Creative cooks that blend traditional taste with modern diets.
Ability heroes: Folks with different physical and mental needs that share their experiences online.
Comfort creators: Influencers that create tranquil, serene digital environments for viewers.
AR gamers: Viewers love to watch these users play multi-player, real-time mystery games.
TALE-gaters: Sports lovers that prefer to go behind-the-scenes and off the field.
Gameday traders: Fantasy sports betters that take it seriously.
Copyconomists: Creators that know the best #dupes.
Afrobeats celebrators: Fans of the growing genre.
Country revivers: Fans of the genre’s contemporary values, like inclusivity.

Which of these conversations and communities is a good fit for your brand? Check out Marketing Brew for more on each.

8 Unconventional Marketing Tactics

NOVEMBER 29, 2023

VP of Marketing at Sparktoro and Adweek Contributor Amanda Natividad shared some unconventional marketing tactics on X:

Add friction. Duncan Hines’ boxed cake didn’t always require eggs, but once the brand added a little extra work that made people feel like they achieved something, sales soared.
White-glove service. It’s not scalable to give every new customer personal attention and connection. But in the early days, it can make all the difference.
Give it away for free. Offering something of value for free, like a real resource, helps people trust and recommend you.
Master one channel at a time. If you don’t have the resources to do everything well, do one thing excellently.
Go niche. Get better ROI from a small channel like a niche newsletter.
Go easy on em. Remind customers of recurring charges, and don’t pull tricks that frustrate them.
Delete, delete, delete. Remove disengaged subscribers from your email list.
Freely promote others. It makes you look trustworthy, and it could lead to cool collabs.

The full thread is on X.

7 Best Practices for Display Ads

NOVEMBER 29, 2023

You know ’em, you ignore ’em—here’s how to get eyeballs on your banner ads:

Go for high-contrast. Create a visual pattern interruption to the typical dark-text, light-background design of websites.
Keep it short. Get your message across in 10 words or less to accommodate small sizes.
Opt for descriptive images. Users should be able to intuitively understand your company and message from your image.
Avoid clutter. Minimize focal points and visual elements that distract and confuse users.
Eyes on the prize. Your ad creative should be different for a prospecting campaign versus a retargeting campaign, in which users are already familiar with your brand.
Optimize the landing page. Create unique landing pages for each of your campaigns that are tuned to your objectives.
Test everything. Try out different color combinations, designs, CTAs, copy, social proofs, images, and value propositions to see what performs the best.

Check out Demand Curve’s comprehensive guide to Display Ads.

PPC Campaigns Help Your SEO

NOVEMBER 27, 2023

PPC ads aren’t just about fast results. Your campaigns can have a significant positive impact on your SEO, too. Here’s how:

PPC campaigns bring in organic and direct leads. As you spend more on Google Ads, people interact with links in various ways—by clicking, scrolling down to your organic links, or seeing your business name and typing it in manually. Without your PPC ads, these leads wouldn’t have appeared.
PPC campaigns help you identify which keywords your organic content should target. Using the Pivot Table Strategy, you can zero in on the high-value high-intent keywords that bring in leads via PPC.
PPC campaigns build brand awareness. Simply seeing your brand’s name subconsciously counts as an interaction, which can go along way toward warming up a lead.

Head over to What Converts to read the blog.

How Do Creatives Feel About AI?

NOVEMBER 24, 2023

It’s been one year since the ChatGPT explosion. The folks at It’s Nice That have surveyed hundreds of creative professionals about their use of and feelings toward AI. Here’s a quick overview:

83% have adopted AI into their workflow.
49% have used AI in the past week.
33% have used AI in the past 6 months.
56% are curious about AI.
41% are excited about the opportunities AI will bring.
36% believe AI’s capabilities are overhyped.
26% feel AI is a negative development for creativity.
55% of creatives that work at agencies and studios have used AI in the past week.
38% of solo artists have never used AI in their work.
27% of self-employed freelancers have never used AI in their work.
78% of strategists, 74% of digital artists, and 65% of advertising professionals use AI.
97% are learning AI through personal experimentation.
Senior members of staff are using AI most frequently.
Just 1% believe that AI-assisted work reaches the highest standards.