🤖 OpenAI proposes policies for social safety.

📅 Instagram allows creators to schedule Trial Reels.

💸 If marketers pulled ad spend from social, where would it even go?

🔥 Bic introduces “Flick Your Bic” to a new generation.

📚 HarperCollins is turning authors’ books into AI YouTube Shorts.

🧠 Crocs’ CMO talks microdramas, TikTok, and Gen Z.

😳 And a cleverly worded campaign for prostate cancer prevention.

New research from SparkToro suggests that influence is distributed across a fragmented web of platforms where people spend their time before they ever search.

Search is only a fraction of total activity and often acts as a response to prior exposure, not the origin of interest.

This means that what looks like a “Google-driven” conversion is usually the result of earlier interactions across multiple channels.

So, marketers risk overinvesting in BOFU channels and underinvesting in the environments where awareness and trust are actually built.

Here’s what you should know:

• Influence occurs across social media, news, entertainment, email, and more.
• Search is a conversion layer, not a primary discovery channel.
• Attribution models over-credit search and undercount earlier touchpoints.
• Being present across platforms is essential because audiences don’t stay in one place.
• AI tools are growing, but their direct share of attention remains relatively small compared to hype.
• We have to shift from “optimize for clicks” to “build presence where attention already exists.” 

Take a look at the research by SparkToro.

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✨ Catch up on Season 2 of The Daily Carnage Show:

• 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 Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music.

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Dollar Shave Club is edging into women’s grooming.

And instead of softening the tone, the brand is doubling down on its irreverence, positioning the new line as explicitly “anti–pink, sparkly, frilly.”

The campaign (across CTV, YouTube, and podcasts) mocks rivals as aesthetically pleasing but functionally inferior, turning anthropomorphized “clean girl” products into punchlines.

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Razza Matazz, 1985