The Daily Carnage

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

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The Year of Slop

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Double Your Open Rate in 1 Month

SEPTEMBER 23, 2025

With the right tweaks your email marketing process, you can double your open rate in 4 weeks (or at least bump it 20–30%) while also boosting CTR.

Here’s the 3-step system:

Fix your onboarding. Your welcome email is the most important message you’ll ever send. Instead of a bland “thanks for joining,” give subscribers a reason to open right away.

Offer a free resource, lead magnet, or exclusive tip inside the welcome email.
Use the WE-PAC method:
- Welcome them warmly.
- Set expectations (topics, send frequency, value).
- Ask them to move you to their Primary inbox.
- Ask for a quick Action (reply with “yes”).
- Include at least one Click CTA

Improve deliverability with BSS Progression. Don’t blast your whole list. Start with your Base Sending Segment (BSS), the most active subscribers, then expand each week:

Week 1: last 30-day openers or 60-day clickers.
Week 2–4: slowly widen the timeframe. This improves sender reputation and inbox placement, leading to higher engagement across the board.

3. Re-engage dead subscribers. Inactive readers drag your metrics down. Use a 2-step win-back sequence.

“Greatest Hits” email: Share 3–5 of your best resources.
“Goodbye email”: Give them a final chance to stay on the list.

By running all three steps at once, you’ll lift performance across new, active, and lapsed subscribers.

Head to Newsletter Operator for more.

Homepage Checklist: 14 Critical Elements

SEPTEMBER 23, 2025

Your homepage is your brand’s front door. Done right, it blends clarity with usability, creating a path that feels natural while still driving action.

It’s like a conversation starter. In just seconds, it needs to capture attention, explain who you are, and encourage the next step without overwhelming the user.

Here are 14 critical homepage elements:

Headline – clear, direct, and benefit-driven.
Sub-headline – adds context and solves a pain point.
Primary CTAs – visible above the fold.
Supporting image or video – emotionally engaging and mobile-optimized.
Benefits – how your solution improves lives.
Social proof – testimonials or reviews.
Navigation – intuitive menus and pathways.
Content offer – downloadable resources for lead capture.
Secondary CTAs – lower-commitment actions deeper on the page.
Features – a concise breakdown of product/service specifics.
Resources – knowledge hubs or guides.
Success indicators – awards, recognition, or partner logos.
Search bar – especially for content-heavy sites.
Contact options – visible and easy to use.

Are Ads Emotional Inception?

SEPTEMBER 22, 2025

Does advertising actually sway consumers through emotional inception and Pavlovian associations?

While this theory is a huge part of our “lore” as advertisers, Kevin Simler argues that it overestimates human susceptibility. Most ads are just too passive to really alter our desires.

Instead, ads shape the broader cultural landscape, signaling social meanings that influence how products are perceived in public.

A conspicuous ad works by showing that everyone else has seen it. Consumers then make rational decisions, choosing products that align with desired social signals.

Here’s what really works:

Awareness: Informing or reminding customers about a product’s existence and functionality.
Promises: Establishing explicit or implicit commitments, like “Disney as a family-friendly brand.”
Honest signaling: Conveying commitment via obvious investment, like billboards or expensive campaigns.
Cultural imprinting: Embedding products within social and cultural norms.

Chewy stuff.

How Do People Really Use ChatGPT?

SEPTEMBER 17, 2025

A new report, “How People Use ChatGPT,” has revealed that around 10% of the global adult population are using ChatGPT weekly, with more than 2.5 billion daily messages exchanged.

Usage has grown rapidly across demographics, with particularly strong growth in younger users and in low- to middle-income countries.

Some insights to know:

Non-work usage now makes up over 70% of all messages, outpacing work-related tasks. Still, professionals with higher education use ChatGPT more for job-related purposes.
Nearly 80% of conversations fall into three categories—Practical Guidance, Seeking Information, and Writing. Writing dominates work contexts, especially editing and rewriting text.
Messages break down into Asking (49%), Doing (40%), and Expressing (11%). At work, Doing (especially writing) is more common, while Asking is linked to decision support in knowledge jobs.
Despite hype, only 4.2% of messages involve coding, and less than 2% involve companionship or emotional support.
Early users skewed male, but the gender gap has nearly disappeared. Under-26s account for about half of all usage.
Most work-related use falls into documenting information, problem-solving, decision-making, and creative thinking—skills central to many white-collar jobs.
User-rated interaction quality is improving; “Asking” messages in particular are rated more highly than “Doing.”

The 4 Ps of Marketing… Reimagined

SEPTEMBER 15, 2025

You know the classic four Ps. Product, price, place, and promotion have guided marketing for decades. But we’re in a new era.

Algorithms, intelligent agents, and real-time data are forcing us to rethink how we create value, reach audiences, and maintain trust.

Let’s remix the 4 Ps:

Product: AI-enhanced innovation and customization
Products are no longer static. Now, AI allows consumers to personalize designs, features, and experiences at scale. Every customer interaction is a creative collaboration.
Price: Dynamic, personal, and transparent
AI-driven pricing optimizes in real time, balancing margins, stock levels, and consumer willingness to pay. The challenge now is trust: dynamic, personalized pricing can delight or alienate.
Place: Smart, adaptive distribution
Place is no longer just a physical or digital location. Smart distribution leverages AI to optimize inventory, highlight products, and engage both humans and machines.
Promotion: From messages to machine-mediated influence
Promotion must persuade humans and be discoverable by machines. It’s all about structured, legible assets, a strong brand footprint, and narratives that resonate emotionally while feeding AI.

Unlock Serendipity in Marketing

SEPTEMBER 15, 2025

✨Serendipity✨ happens when an experience is enjoyable, unexpected, and inexplicable. It feels almost magical because it resists easy explanation.

For marketers, this means resisting the urge to over-explain or over-engineer the “why” behind product experiences. Instead, the goal is to leave just enough mystery to spark delight.

Serendipity can deepen emotional connection to a brand. The art lies in balancing joy with ambiguity, ensuring the moment feels organic rather than orchestrated.

Here are some tips for unlocking serendipity:

✨ Add joy in unlikely contexts. Offer a small surprise in an environment where it doesn’t belong (chocolate at a bank, not a candy store).
✨ Embrace unpredictability. Deliver moments of surprise that feel low-probability.
✨ Resist over-explaining. Avoid broadcasting that an experience was algorithmically curated or “chosen just for you.” Leave room for mystery.
✨ Balance personalization with randomness. Dial down the obviousness of recommendations to let consumers “discover” on their own.
✨ Test for context fit. Ensure the moment is not only surprising, but enjoyable and appropriate.

Retargeting With the Reddit Pixel

SEPTEMBER 11, 2025

Reddit has over 400 million weekly active users across thousands of niche communities. The Reddit Pixel offers a cost-effective alternative to retarget high-intent visitors and drive conversions.

Retargeting ads differ from standard Reddit campaigns because they focus on “warm” audiences—users who have already shown interest—rather than cold prospects. This enables more personalized, direct messaging designed to nudge users toward actions like demo requests or content downloads.

Here’s how to build an effective Reddit retargeting strategy:

Install the Reddit Pixel: Manually on your website or via Google Tag Manager.
Verify and test: Use the Reddit Pixel Helper to ensure proper setup and no duplicate tracking.
Configure conversion events: Track leads, downloads, demo requests, and other mid- or bottom-funnel actions.
Build custom audiences: Segment by page visits, content engagement, abandoned forms, or high-intent actions.
Launch retargeting ads: Optimize for conversions with authentic messaging that aligns with Reddit’s community culture.

This allows you to nurture prospects through long sales cycles, lower cost-per-lead, and maximize return on ad spend.

YouTube: Creative Maximalism is The Moment

SEPTEMBER 10, 2025

YouTube’s latest Culture & Trends report, “The Next Generation of Creativity: A Maximalist Moment Reshaping Culture,” explores how younger audiences (especially teens) are redefining content through creative maximalism.

This generation has grown up with YouTube as a constant and thrives on participatory, networked media. Rather than just consuming content, they actively shape it, curate it, and remix it.

Here are four defining elements of creative maximalism:

Audio/visual complexity: Dense layers of info and rapid-fire editing that pack content with visual and auditory stimuli.
Narrative co-creation: Decentralized storytelling where fans and creators jointly drive sprawling worlds, characters, and plot lines.
Internet-referential: Humor and ideas built on nuanced layers of online in-jokes, memes, and layered cultural nods.
Globally influenced: Fusion of cultural references from around the world, creating mashups that transcend local contexts

Over Half of Consumers Distrust AI Search

SEPTEMBER 8, 2025

More than half of consumers don’t fully trust AI-powered search results, according to a new Gartner survey.

Fifty-three percent of U.S. respondents expressed skepticism about the reliability and impartiality of AI-driven summaries, while 41% said these overviews actually make searching more frustrating than traditional methods.

The survey of 377 consumers, conducted in June–July 2025, also found a strong preference for user control: 61% want the option to toggle AI summaries on or off. This reinforces that consumers don’t just want answers—they want choice in how they find them.

So, how can we respond?

Prioritize authority: Publish accurate, in-depth content that demonstrates expertise.
Be transparent: Make sources and methodologies clear to build trust.
Optimize for both worlds: Structure content for traditional SEO and AI-driven summaries.
Diversify channels: Invest in multichannel discoverability beyond search.
Respect user choice: Provide clear, user-friendly pathways outside of AI-driven experiences.