🎙️ Interrupting your weekly trivia for a little favor.

✍️ Would you consider taking a brief survey to help us optimize your experience of The Daily Carnage?

🧡 You’re a marketer, so you get it. This delicious data helps us preserve what you love, scrap what you don’t, and deliver on our promise to make you the sharpest marketer in the room.

Thanks in advance,
Team Carney

⛔ A Black Gen Zer’s message to brands: Cutting DEI policies comes at a cost.

🔍 Meanwhile, Google tells employees why it’s ending DEI hiring goals.

🧵 Turns out Threads is driving more engagement than X.

• 💡 According to our poll, 44% of respondents report good organic results on Threads, while 41% report excellent results.

☕ Starbucks members get a free 12 oz coffee the Monday after the Super Bowl.

▶️ LinkedIn amps up vertical video tools as uploads jump 36%.

🎨 Google’s Product Studio generates AI scenes to showcase your products.

💸 Here’s what else a $7M, 30-second Super Bowl budget can purchase in 2025.

⚖️ X sues Lego, Nestlé and more brands, accusing them of advertising boycott.

💬 Google Business Profile adds WhatsApp and SMS features.

🪄 Mastercard and Lady Gaga team up to debut “Abracadabra” music video and more.

🍪 The latest on Chrome’s cookie choice prompt.

🌭 Heinz teams with hip-hop hitmaker Mustard for a new product and campaign.

🎯 Target’s DEI reversal ignites customer fury.

▶️ LinkedIn’s video push appears to be working in 2025.

👀 Instagram will soon let you rearrange your profile grid.

📱 YouTube now has device type analytics in the Studio dashboard.

🪐 Astronomers call for global ban on space advertising before it’s too late.

💡 An AI solution from Jellyfish analyzes how brands are perceived by LLMs.

🐯 Cheetos designed a terrible custom font on purpose.

Monday: Employee-generated content (EGC) is appearing in nearly every 2025 social media trend prediction. Why? It yields significant results. Rachel Karten spoke with Byron Stewart, the associate director of social media at Team Epiphany, to learn more about implementing an EGC process.

• 💡 According to our poll, 80% of respondents are currently leveraging EGC for their brand(s) with positive results.

Tuesday: Discord’s latest advertising solution, Quests, is designed to engage the platform’s highly active gaming community by rewarding players for interacting with brand content. Here’s how it works and why it’s a game-changer for marketers.

Wednesday: The gen AI market is projected to expand annually by 24.4% through 2030. This surge is already influencing search trends, with ChatGPT increasingly directing traffic to a wider range of websites. By analyzing millions of clickstream records, Semrush and Statista identified these key trends and changes in search intent, prompt length, and referral traffic distribution.

Wednesday: Google’s VP and General Manager of Ads and Commerce, Vidhya Srinivasan, shared these top tips for your 2025 marketing agenda. Number one on the list? Embrace AI as a business essential.

Lock in, Carnies.

The real game begins when they cut to commercials.

Trending in The Daily Carnage Facebook group this week…

“Has anyone noticed a trend in Facebook ads where you’re getting a lot of clicks but people are not taking the next action (donating, filling out a form, etc. )? I have had a few clients with this lately and don’t think it’s a problem with the landing pages or ads themselves.”

Here’s what our community of experts say…

• “While it seems like there’s always waves of these occurrences, I’ve seen in the past 10+ years of running ads for 3,000+ companies all over the world, that it is: 1) a temporary test from FB and lasts only a couple of days, after which your performance evens out again, 2) an issue with general targeting / frequency getting too high / audience getting tired, OR 3) the website / landing pages / plugins getting updated and something doesn’t work anymore. This happens more often than people think. Especially when people use landing page builder tools, those often don’t tell you when something is changing.”
• “A few ideas of what I’d look at if I was diagnosing this: Landing page load time (people will not wait anymore), UI/UX of landing page (are there popups, lots of mobile shift, not mobile-friendly), issues with the landing page (if you’re asking for donations, double-check that your SSL certificate is working), is the landing page consistent with expectations, how intensive is the next action, does it require a login/password setup, is the form lengthy or want a lot of typing. If you are confident you’re targeting the right folks and all of the above are not the issues, I might run a small retargeting campaign to those folks.”

Ingredients

• 6 apricots
• 1 ½ oz tequila
• ½ oz Cointreau
• ½ oz lime juice
• ½ oz hot honey

Recipe by Tasting Table