AI

🎬 The AI tool behind fake Brad Pitt fight is making Hollywood inroads.

🤖 Marketing teams are starting to treat AI like a new coworker.

🧠 WTF is AI poisoning?

PLATFORMS

📱 Meta launches Pocket creative app.

🎯 Opinion: Leave platform-specific social strategies behind.

🎥 X is rolling out new video editing tools for creators.

⚖️ Meta could face up to $1.4 trillion in penalties over its advertising practices.

MARKETING

🗽American brands are split how to approach patriotism.

📺 Next up: dynamically inserted billboards in TV content.

🛍️ Nordstrom is building hype ahead of its biggest sale of the season.

💬 Hinge’s latest campaign positions honesty as the future of online dating.

INSIGHTS

📚 CMOs share their 2026 beach reads.

📣 Five creative campaigns worth adding to your inspiration folder.

⚽ At the Club World Cup, the smartest brands are earning attention—not buying it.

Monday: TikTok isn’t just a social platform anymore—it’s become a powerful search engine. To improve visibility, brands need to think beyond hashtags and optimize for how TikTok understands content, using spoken keywords, on-screen text, captions, location signals, and audience engagement. Creating helpful, search-driven content is becoming just as important as chasing viral trends. Get the full breakdown here.

Tuesday: Some of email marketing’s most common subject line “rules” no longer hold up. Today, inbox providers prioritize engagement, sender reputation, and subscriber interest over rigid formulas like avoiding certain words or sticking to a specific character count. Instead of following outdated best practices, marketers should focus on testing what resonates with their audience and measure success beyond open rates. Head to MarTech for more.

Wednesday: More leads don’t always translate into more revenue. If Google Ads is optimizing for every form submission equally, it may prioritize quantity over quality. By connecting CRM data, tracking offline conversions, and assigning values to different funnel stages, advertisers can help Google’s algorithm focus on finding customers who are most likely to generate real business results. Explore the complete guide.

Thursday: High traffic means little if your content doesn’t help buyers make a decision. Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) content is designed for people actively comparing solutions, so it should address real pain points, provide proof through use cases and comparisons, and clearly connect product features to business outcomes. The goal is to give prospects the confidence they need to take the next step. Read the full article on Mint Studios.

Today, AI is integrated into nearly all of our marketing workflows, whether we like it or not.

It’s tempting to think of it as a free productivity tool, but the truth is that it comes with significant energy, water, land, and social costs.

In the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show, Shannon gives an overview of:

• How AI demand is stressing global infrastructures
• Increasing efficiency vs. exponential demand
• Calls for more transparency

…and how marketers can better understand their relationship to AI, set their own participation boundaries, and advocate for responsible decision-making on their teams.

🎙️ Don’t miss “Brand vs. Planet: The Marketer’s AI Footprint” now streaming on:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Amazon Music
• Apple Music

Can you grow the right connections? ♻️

Weigh in on The Daily Carnage Subreddit:

• The Daily Carnage Show Ep 2.9 Discussion: “If AI agents become the primary interface to knowledge, what happens to the humans and businesses that knowledge originally came from? What does it mean for the internet to quietly transition from an open ecosystem of destinations into a closed ecosystem of gate-kept answers? Are we speeding toward a future where people stop visiting the web directly? If that behavior ends, we ever be able to rebuild it?”

🎙️ 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.

Dodge, 1968

Answer: Water

While data centers are known for their massive electricity use, they also rely on enormous amounts of water to keep servers cool. As AI adoption accelerates and more data centers come online, balancing technological growth with responsible water and energy use is becoming an increasingly important sustainability challenge.

Check out the latest episode of The Daily Carnage “Brand X Planet”, where we explore the intersection of AI, marketing, and sustainability.