🤖 LinkedIn says its AI slop button is working.

🎒 Gen Alpha is reshaping back-to-school spending.

💘 Gen Z is turning Meetup into a dating strategy to fight loneliness.

🎵 Spotify is rolling out user Notes and a Running Mode.

📱 This app delivers texts at 110 mph — unless you’re driving.

✍️ AI fears are fueling the handmade branding trend.

🎬 TikTok adds legacy account options for creators.

Creators are becoming a bigger part of how brands build relationships with audiences, but there’s still a tendency to treat creator partnerships as a media buy: find someone with the right audience, negotiate a deal, publish the content, and move on.

YouTube is making that model more interesting. As creators build businesses around their channels, brands have more opportunities to work with them beyond a single sponsored video — from longer-term partnerships to integrations that feel more naturally connected to the creator’s content and community.

So what should marketers keep in mind?

• Think beyond one-off deals: Longer-term creator relationships can give brands more consistency and make partnerships feel less transactional.
• Look at the whole creator business: A creator’s value isn’t limited to their audience size. Their formats, community, products, and other brand relationships can reveal more opportunities to collaborate.
• Let creators keep their voice: The more a partnership feels like something the creator would genuinely make, the less it feels like an ad dropped into their content.
• Build for the platform: YouTube gives creators more room for storytelling than a quick social post. Give partnerships enough space to take advantage of that.

Get the full scoop at Ad Age.

Turn your browser into a smarter research assistant.

Aximote helps you capture and organize information from the web, making it easier to collect useful content as you research without constantly switching between tools.
Whether you’re gathering inspiration, saving references, or building a research trail, it keeps the process closer to where the work is actually happening.

A handy addition to any marketer’s research toolkit.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show to explore AI’s impact on entry-level marketing jobs—and the potential talent pipeline crisis that could follow.

Companies are already hiring fewer junior employees as AI takes over foundational tasks. But those “boring” tasks are also where marketers develop judgment, critical thinking, strategic instincts, and creative voice.

So what does an entry-level marketing job look like when AI can handle much of the routine work? And how do we make sure we aren’t optimizing ourselves into a future shortage of experienced marketers?

Shannon breaks down the entry-level talent crisis, the rise of AI-native marketers, the importance of mentorship and apprenticeship, and what young marketers can do to build real expertise in an AI-first world.

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• Microdramas Are Taking Over Marketing (10:43)
• Meta Muse Will Change How We Use the Internet (11:53)
• AI CEOs Want to Slow Down. The AI Race Won’t. (11:39)
• Reddit Is Changing SEO & AI Search (10:55)
• The Creator Economy Rules Gaming (43:53)
• Dark Patterns Are Becoming a Legal Problem for Meta (12:06)
• Dissecting the Brand Apology (11:35)
• Instagram’s Controversial New Logo (10:34)
• Google Image Search is… Pinterest? (9:26)
• Sony & The Death of Physical Media (8:57)

🎙️ 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.

China Mobile is turning the Qixi Festival into a surreal journey through countless dimensions to show what it means to stay connected.

Created by F5 Shanghai, the fully AI-generated film follows a young man who loses contact with a girl he meets on the subway, sending him across ancient landscapes, Wild West towns, forests, and futuristic worlds in search of a way back to her. The journey eventually leads him to the “10086th dimension,” where China Mobile’s hotline reconnects the pair.

The Henry J, 1950