📣 OpenAI is racing to build its advertising business.

🧸Carter’s is betting on nostalgia for its biggest rebrand in 26 years.

🏈 Sydney Sweeney’s Novig ad is facing backlash from women athletes.

🧬 AI clones are speeding up CVS’s strategy.

📖 Merriam-Webster just added a new batch of words.

🤖 Looking for a free ChatGPT alternative?.

✈️ The passport courier industry is deceiving consumers.

There’s a lot of SEO content out there saying roughly the same thing. And if your next article is just a slightly different version of what already ranks, you’re adding another page to an already crowded conversation.

The idea behind Information Gain is simple: content has more value when it brings something new to the table. That could mean original research, first-party data, hands-on experience, unique analysis, or useful visuals that help people understand something they couldn’t get from the other results. Hobo’s take on the concept suggests that SEO teams should spend less time asking, “How can we make this look like the top results?” and more time asking, “What are the top results missing?”

So how can you add more information gain to your content?

• Bring your own data: Use surveys, customer insights, experiments, or proprietary research instead of relying entirely on existing sources.
• Add actual expertise: Share observations and lessons that come from doing the work, not just researching it.
• Create original visuals: Diagrams, charts, screenshots, and other useful assets can make your content more than a wall of text.
• Find the gap: Study the existing results and identify what they consistently fail to answer.
• Stay relevant: Being different isn’t enough. Your new information still needs to answer the searcher’s actual question.
• Stop rewriting the SERP: If the only thing you’re adding is a new way to say what everyone else already said, there probably isn’t much new value there.

The goal isn’t to make your content different for the sake of being different. It’s to give people a reason to choose your page after they’ve already seen everything else.

Head to Hobo for the full breakdown.

Your marketing stack can get expensive fast.

Sumo is a marketplace where founders, marketers, and small businesses can discover SaaS tools at discounted rates. The idea is pretty simple: find software that solves a problem you have, subscribe through Sumo, and lock in the discounted price for as long as you stay subscribed.

It’s a handy place to browse when you know you need a new tool but don’t particularly feel like paying full price for it.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show to dive into the dark patterns that have been a UX and marketing problem for years. Now, they’re increasingly becoming a legal one.

In this episode of The Daily Carnage Show, we’re looking at Meta’s growing legal scrutiny over the design of Facebook and Instagram—and what it could mean for marketers, UX designers, and anyone building digital products.

We break down what deceptive design and “dark patterns” actually are, including manipulative defaults, difficult cancellation flows, buried information, infinite scroll, autoplay, and other design choices that can steer users toward decisions they might not otherwise make.

We’ll also look at the bigger question behind the current litigation: When does persuasion become manipulation, and when can a company become legally responsible for the way its product is designed?

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• Dissecting the Brand Apology (11:35)
• Instagram’s Controversial New Logo (10:34)
• Google Image Search is… Pinterest? (9:26)
• Sony & The Death of Physical Media (8:57)
• Brand vs. Planet: The Marketer’s AI Footprint (12:14)
• The Future of Google Search (9:56)
• GLP-1s are Disrupting Every Sector (9:56)
• Transgressive OOH (18:45)
• Your Brain on AI (12:33)
• Ethics in the AI Era (18:33)

🎙️ Now streaming on Youtube, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music.

Got a marketing problem you’re trying to solve? Need a second opinion? Wondering whether a new platform, AI tool, campaign idea, or strategy is worth pursuing?

Every Friday, we’re clocking in for Agency Office Hours sessions: 30-minute sessions for Daily Carnage readers to chat with the Carney team.

Bring your questions. We’ll bring our experience.

Whether you’re trying to improve performance, navigate industry changes, troubleshoot a campaign, or simply sanity-check an idea, we wanna hear what you’ve got going on.

No pitches. No obligations. No sales deck. Seriously.

Just a free 30-minute conversation with the team behind The Daily Carnage.

👉 Reserve your Office Hours session now.

🎙️ 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.

Let’s take this party outside of the inbox, Carnies!

Connect and network with over 20,000 marketers to get (and give) advice, feedback, support, and LOLs.

• 💬 Join r/TheDailyCarnage on Reddit
• 👍 Join The Daily Carnage Facebook Group

😎 See ya there.

Your lunch has had enough of your emails.

Knees to Chin is calling out the habit of eating lunch at your desk with two very unhappy ingredients: a giant shrimp and a sweet potato. In the campaign’s short films, they confront office workers about what they went through just to end up being eaten in front of an unread inbox.

The shrimp was caught, boiled, peeled, and fed premium algae. The sweet potato spent three weeks underground. And this is how we repay them?

If you won’t take a break for yourself, at least do it for your lunch.

Oaker Oats, 1899