Be in The Know
🤖 With OpenAI’s Sora, the AI video flood is here.
🎞️ Instagram’s new feature lets you test your Reel content with non-audiences.
💬 How WhatsApp became an unstoppable cultural force.
💭 It was a banner year for nostalgia-washing.
💄 Behind e.l.f. Cosmetics’ Indy 500 sponsorship and Purdue University partnership.
😎 New on LinkedIn: Add an auto-revolving slideshow of images as the banner on your profile.
🔥 How American Girl got trendy on TikTok.
How Marketers are Spending 2025 Budgets
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The headlines are starting to warn of an ad-spend slowdown in 2025. But, based on Neil Patel’s survey of over 11k marketers, optimism seems to prevail.
Here’s how marketers plan to adjust (or not) in the next year:
SEO:
- 44% plan to increase budgets, believing SEO remains effective despite AI’s impact.
- 39% will maintain budgets, as it is consistently working.
- 17% will decrease due to algorithm concerns and AI-driven uncertainty.
Organic Social:
- 25% increasing budgets for brand awareness.
- 17% maintaining due to necessity and customer interaction benefits.
- 58% decreasing due to declining reach.
Content Creation:
- 63% increasing budgets to meet diverse format demands, human-led content preference, and podcast growth.
- 33% maintaining budgets for repurposing efficiency.
- 4% decreasing, leveraging AI to cut costs.
AI SEO:
- 97% investing in AI-focused SEO (e.g., ChatGPT).
- Only 1% decreasing, citing ineffective results.
Email Marketing:
- 28% increasing budgets to grow lists and adapt to algorithm changes.
- 59% maintaining due to effectiveness.
- 13% decreasing to save costs.
CRO/UX:
- 59% increasing budgets to counter rising ad costs and improve ROI.
Community Building:
- 81% increasing budgets to enhance human connections amid AI growth.
Take a look at the full scope from Neil Patel.
Q for You
Tools
Openvibe
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“So, where do we go now?”
If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve seen a few mass social-platform migrations.
It’s a weird feeling—everyone scatters, your digital routine is upended, and all you wanna do is find your people again, wherever they are.
Openvibe is cool because it’s all decentralized social networks (Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr, Threads, and more) in a unified timeline.
This way, you can migrate your followers, and connect across platforms without boundaries or platform conventions.
Classifieds
Place a Classified Ad in a Friday edition of The Daily Carnage for just $99.
What you get:
- 200 characters 📣
- An internal link 🔗
- Your ad lives on our site indefinitely 💛
Let’s get it on the calendar.
Watch
Two Legends Walk into a Bar
Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s Still G.I.N. brand has deepfaked a few icons for a new campaign that premiered during The Voice last night.
Dre and Snoop walk into a snazzy jazz club dressed to the nines to enjoy priority treatment. Guess who buys them some drinks?
Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.
Or, rather, their anachronistic AI avatars. Don’t worry, the work was done in collaboration with both estates.
Frank Sinatra’s daughter Tina loved the concept. “To see Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg alongside my dad and Sammy Davis Jr. in such a revolutionary way is both thrilling and surreal,” she told PEOPLE.
