🛍️ Meta updates its livestream shopping tools.

🤖 Google AI Overviews cite self-serving listicles, but recommend competitors 69% of the time.

📸 Polaroid takes a shot at data centers.

👜 Coach turns its attention to Gen Z.

📞 The Y2K-inspired Commodore Callback 8020 is a smart-dumb flipphone.

🍕 Papa Johns can predict when your fridge is empty.

Don’t use AI for emotional communication.

New research finds that people react significantly more negatively when they learn an emotional message was written by AI rather than a human.

Across six experiments involving more 2,200+ participants, AI-authored emotional messages consistently triggered feelings of inauthenticity and even moral disgust. The result?

That means less trust, less advocacy, and fewer positive brand interactions.

Check it out:

• People were 24.6% less likely to recommend a brand after receiving an AI-written emotional message.
• AI-authored messages generated 58.4% more moral disgust in certain customer communication scenarios.
• Sympathy messages written by AI led to 23.6% less word-of-mouth sharing.
• When a message was written by AI but signed by a person, participants reported 140.9% more moral disgust than when both the writing and signature came from a human.
• Emotional messages were penalized far more heavily than factual ones.

So… write that apology, tribute, or heartfelt customer note yourself.

RetroMac’s new tool is an open-source desktop browser that lets you relive the vibe of late-90s and early-2000s browsers.

It’s got modern Chromium under the hood, so today’s web works as it should, but the built-in Wayback Mode lets you view websites as they appeared 30 years ago.

Surf with pixel-perfect versions of Internet Explorer 5.0, Netscape Communicator 4.8, Firefox 1.0, and Safari 1.0.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show, “Brand vs. Planet: The Marketer’s AI Footprint,” to learn more about the energy, water, land, and infrastructure costs behind the tech that powers your whole stack.

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• Our Picks for the 2026 Titanium Lions (13:06)
• Silent Spring: Is Rainbox Capitalism Dead? (11:41)
• The Future of Google Search (9:56)
• GLP-1s are Disrupting Every Sector (9:56)
• Spirit Airlines 2.0: Will it Fly? (11:08)
• Major Platform Updates (8:17)
• Nike Runs into Controversy (12:19)
• Transgressive OOH (18:45)
• Your Brain on AI (12:33)
• Meta, McDonald’s Mukbang, and The OpenAI Mess (14:41)
• Ethics in the AI Era (18:33)

🎙️ Now streaming on Youtube, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music.

Let’s take this party outside of the inbox, Carnies!

Connect and network with over 20,000 marketers to get (and give) advice, feedback, support, and LOLs.

• 💬 Join r/TheDailyCarnage on Reddit
• 👍 Join The Daily Carnage Facebook Group

😎 See ya there.

🎙️ The Daily Carnage Show is growing!

So, we’re excited to share a new sponsorship opportunity.

Book a Pre-Roll Ad at the top the episode with your preferred script, on-screen text, and link in description.

🎧 Podcast advertising is one of the highest-performing brand channels:

• 60%+ of listeners say they’ve searched for a product after hearing it on a podcast.
• Podcast ads consistently outperform display ads on engagement and recall.
• Pre-roll ads are among the most-heard placements, with the strongest completion rates.

🗣️ This is your opportunity to reach a highly engaged audience of marketers, creatives, and strategists when they’ve got their listening ears on.

Interested in sponsoring an upcoming episode? Reach out and let’s build something together.

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Let’s keep the nostalgia flowing today.

IKEA is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its 1996 catalog with a Time Capsule experience.

Give us all the pine furniture, patterned textiles, and minimalist Scandi design!

They’ve opened up a digital window into late-’90s home design, and man does it feel good. Worth a scroll.

Colt 45, 1969