💄 Target is giving its beauty business a major makeover with Beauty Studio.

🤖 Data centers are facing a growing backlash as AI drives demand.

🍎 Apple says it found “shocking evidence” in its OpenAI trade secrets case.

🎃 49% of Halloween shoppers start planning before October.

⚡ Google is investing $350M in solar power for its AI infrastructure.

💰 The global economy could hit $150T by 2030.

🕹️ Evercade is betting on physical games in a digital world.

🛒 Aldi’s famous dupes are raising a tricky question: where’s the legal line?

Your audience doesn’t need another brand trying to get them to like, comment, and buy. They need a reason to participate.

HeyOrca’s latest examples of community-led marketing show how brands like Dr. Pepper, Squishmallows, My Indie Coffee, and HeyOrca itself are giving their audiences a more active role in the brand. Dr. Pepper turned a fan-made TikTok sound into an actual brand jingle. Squishmallows invited followers to create their own version of a summer day. And HeyOrca shifted its community spaces toward conversations, advice, and shared experiences.

So how can you make your audience part of the marketing?

• Invite participation: Give people something to create, vote on, answer, or contribute to.
• Give credit: If someone creates something great for your brand, recognize them and give their idea room to grow.
• Create connections: Help community members learn from, support, and discover each other.
• Connect your channels: Let your newsletter, social content, events, and community spaces work together instead of operating in separate bubbles.

The goal isn’t to create more content for your audience. It’s to create more reasons for them to be involved.

Head to HeyOrca for more.

DashThis is a marketing reporting and dashboard platform that helps marketing agencies and in-house teams turn 30+ connected data sources into automated, client-ready, white-labeled dashboards.

Connect GA4, Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Ahrefs and the rest of your stack, plus CSV for anything custom. Start from a preset template or build your own layout with drag-and-drop widgets. Set the refresh schedule once and reports update themselves, then land in your client’s inbox on the day you picked. Your logo, your colors, your domain. Unlimited users on every plan, so the whole team gets access without a seat math conversation.

Built-in AI Insights reads each dashboard and writes up the summary, the wins, the opportunities and the issues, so you walk into the client call with the story already drafted.

New: the DashThis MCP connector

The MCP connector brings your dashboard data into the AI assistant you already use, Claude or ChatGPT. Connect DashThis in your assistant, authorize, and you’re set in about a minute.

Ask “why did leads drop for Client X last month” and get an answer grounded in your real reporting data with full historical context, not a plausible-sounding guess. Query your entire client portfolio in one question. Data stays isolated per client, so nothing bleeds across accounts.

It’s open to every DashThis customer and to free trial users with at least one dashboard built.

Plans start at $44/month. The 14-day free trial gives you 10 dashboards, no credit card.

🎙️ 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.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show where we break down how Reddit has evolved from an internet forum into an increasingly important part of the search ecosystem.

Today, Reddit threads appear in Google results, product researchers are actively adding “Reddit” to their searches, and AI platforms are pulling Reddit conversations into their answers.

So what does that mean for marketers?

In this episode of The Daily Carnage Show, Shannon breaks down Reddit’s emerging role in SEO and AI visibility — and why your brand’s most influential search content may be content you don’t own or control.

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• The Creator Economy Rules Gaming (43:53)
• Dark Patterns Are Becoming a Legal Problem for Meta (12:06)
• 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)
• Ethics in the AI Era (18:33)

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

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.

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.

What happens when a decade-long WWE rivalry moves from the ring into Clash of Clans?

Cody Rhodes is recruiting players — and fellow WWE Superstars — to help him hunt down John Cena’s loot-filled base. From September 1 to 30, successful raids could earn players an exclusive Cody Rhodes statue.

The crossover also brings six WWE stars into the game as Clash Heroes, plus WWE-themed troops, rewards, and a Money in the Bank-inspired village.

Kellogg’s, 1910