Be in The Know
š Redditās ad business reported a 69% YOY revenue increase in Q1.
āļø A Spirit Airlines fan has launched Spirit 2.0, a crowdsourcing effort to buy the airline.
š§ Spotify identifies human creators with āverifiedā checkmarks.
š¤ Data: Gartner finds 40% of agentic AI projects will fail.
š Report: Google Ads CTR is rising, but conversions remain flat.
š Syracuse University launches Creator Economy minor.
AI Gives Inconsistent Brand Recommendations
New research from SparkToro highlights a huge AI misconception: While we tend to think of tools like ChatGPT as consistent āanswer engines,ā they actually behave more like probabilistic generators.
In controlled experiments with nearly 3,000 responses, identical prompts rarely produced the same list of brand or product recommendations (less than 1% of the time) and almost never in the same order.
Weāre used to traditional SEO, which assumes stable rankings. But AI outputs appear to show variability in three dimensions: which brands appear, how many are listed, and how theyāre ordered. So, ātracking your positionā inside AI responses is pretty much meaningless. Itās not fixed.
But while rankings are chaotic, brands that consistently show up, regardless of position, are more strongly associated with a given intent in the modelās training and retrieval patterns.
Hereās what to know:
- AI recommendations are non-deterministic. The same query yields different outputs almost every time.
- Rank tracking is unreliable, as order and inclusion constantly change.
- Prompt diversity amplifies chaos. Users phrase the same intent in wildly different ways.
- Visibility share (frequency of mentions) is a more defensible metric than rank.
- AI tools reflect association, not endorsement. They predict likely mentions, not ābestā choices.
- Marketers should demand transparent methodologies from AI tracking vendors.
Head to SparkToro for a closer look at the numbers.
Q for You
Have you tested Reddit ads this year?
NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat is a helpful social tool for managing conversations at scale and pulling comments, messages, and reviews from across channels into one dashboard.
Beyond the basics (scheduling, collaboration, analytics), there is AI-powered moderation to filter spam, hide harmful comments, and auto-respond to common questions.
It treats social media less like a broadcasting channel and more like a support channel.
Now Streaming
Catch up on Season 2 of The Daily Carnage Show:
- Major Platform Updates (8:17)
- Nike Runs into Controversy (12:19)
- Transgressive OOH (18:45)
- Your Brain on AIĀ (12:33)
- Meta, McDonaldās Mukbang, and The OpenAI MessĀ (14:41)
- Ethics in the AI EraĀ (18:33)
šļø Now streaming onĀ Youtube,Ā Spotify,Ā Amazon Music, andĀ Apple Music.
Sponsor The Daily Carnage
āThe Daily Carnage was the newsletter that brought us the most meaningful demo clicks and new trials.ā ā Digital Summit
āOpen rate was nearly 50% and CTR was relatively high, especially considering this newsletterās audience was likely being exposed to our event for the first time.ā ā Adweek
Hop on our 2026 sponsorship calendar to get your content in front of 25,000 marketers.
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Squirrel Worship
Squirrelfriends, check out this campaign by Canva.
In a stunt created with Quality Meats, Canva created a fictional āsquirrel worshipā movement in NYC by planting a statue, launching āSquirrelitesā experiences, and seeding social and influencer content.
Yesterday, they revealed the punchline: this is what happens when even the strangest idea is given the tools to look real.
r/TheDailyCarnage
Weigh in on The Daily Carnage Subreddit:
- The Daily Carnage Show Ep 2.6 Discussion: āWhich major social platform updates from this spring are you most excited (or skeptical) about? Which of these features are you likely to test?ā
- B2B lead gen and data enrichment tools: āOur team has just had an abysmal experience with Seamless.ai and weāre interested in exploring competitor. Do you have a tool youād recommend?ā
- Using LinkedInās Post Inspector to Reset Cached Meta Data and Images: āLinkedIn will sometimes stubbornly associate an out of date featured image with a URL from your website. Hereās a super simple fix.ā
Ads from The Past

General Electric, 1950s




