🛒 Shopify outage disrupts stores, checkouts and admin access.

👥 Meta expands 13+ content settings for teens globally.

📈 LinkedIn expands in-app mobile post boosting.

📉 Tariffs forced Temu to slash its U.S. ad spend on nearly every platform.

🎆 Brands are approaching Fourth of July campaigns cautiously.

🥤 Schweppes reinvents itself.

Growing on social media can feel like a mysterious game of luck, but it’s more predictable than most people realize.

Growth is driven by two core levers: creating content around proven topics and intentionally building relationships with other creators.

The first lever is to focus on ideas that have already demonstrated demand. Instead of constantly searching for completely original topics, identify subjects, hooks, and formats that audiences consistently engage with. The goal is to contribute a unique perspective to a conversation people already care about. Attention is won through familiar themes, while originality comes from the creator’s experiences, opinions, and examples.

The second lever is networking. Social media platforms are ecosystems of people and communities. Rather than relying solely on algorithms, you can accelerate growth by building genuine relationships with peers. Consistent interaction, thoughtful conversations, sharing resources, and supporting others can create opportunities for collaboration and audience exposure.

Here’s the skinny:

• Study high-performing content in your niche.
• Reuse proven topics while adding your own perspective.
• Focus on packaging, including titles, hooks, and positioning.
• Engage with creators before expecting engagement in return.
• Build authentic relationships through DMs, comments, and conversations.
• Share resources and create value for others.
• View audience growth as a skill that can be learned and practiced.
• Treat networking as an essential part of content creation, not an afterthought.

Head to Future/Proof by Dan Koe to learn more.

Hey, Carney here—the digital agency behind The Daily Carnage. Mind if we share a little of what we’ve been working on, aside from your favorite daily newsletter?

This is our client Udio. They’ve redefining music creation with its generative AI platform that transforms simple text prompts into fully produced songs—complete with vocals, instrumentation, and lyrics.

They partnered with us to amplify their brand presence and accelerate user growth. We produced engaging content, high-impact ads, and dynamic animations to showcase new feature launches and platform capabilities.

The results strengthened Udio’s position as a leader in AI-driven music creation and drove engagement from creators, fans, and industry partners. You can learn more about our work with Udio here.

Have a project we can take to the next level? Let’s talk about it.

Salesforce’s latest updates bring AI agents directly into marketing workflows.

The biggest addition is Marketing Cloud Next, a redesigned platform that uses AI agents to create campaign briefs, build audience segments, generate personalized content, and optimize customer journeys with minimal human intervention.

AI agents can now also qualify leads, answer questions, nurture prospects, and pass high-intent opportunities to sales teams.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show, “The Future of Google Search,” to learn more about Google’s plans to replace the search box with 24/7 AI-powered information agents and interactive “Generative UI” that builds mini-apps and custom widgets directly on your results page.

What does that mean for advertising, for SEO, for the Internet as we know it?

Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• GLP-1s are Disrupting Every Sector (9:56)
• Spirit Airlines 2.0: Will it Fly? (11:08)
• Major Platform Updates (8:17)
• Nike Runs into Controversy (12:19)
• Transgressive OOH (18:45)
• 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 Youtube, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music.

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.

🍎 56% of consumers shop both online and in-store for groceries. Hybrid is the default. See how discovery and cart behavior is evolving in the SmartCommerce 2026 Ecommerce Trends Report. Download it now.

Book a Classified Ad on-demand for $99

Pepsi’s latest global football campaign imagines a world where fans, not players or brands, define football’s unwritten rules.

It features David Beckham, Mohamed Salah, Vini Jr., Lauren James, Alexia Putellas, and Florian Wirtz, and it celebrates the debates, superstitions, rituals, and rivalries that the fandom unique (like settling arguments on the pitch).

Best of all, there’s a browser extension that automatically changes the word “soccer” to “football” and a partnership with Reddit that invites fans to debate and create their own rules for the game.

Merriam-Webster, 1965