🔎 Google’s own NotebookLM is becoming a target for parasite SEO.

🍟 McDonald’s is turning its restaurants into an ad network, with plans to build a billion-dollar media business.

🎯 Target is putting its design legacy at the center of its new campaign.

🥪 Subway is getting inside your head with Will Arnett.

🧵 Meta is giving businesses more control over their Threads accounts.

▶️ YouTube is battling Netflix for top creator talent.

Finding influencers sounds easy until you actually have to find the right one.

Follower count can give you a starting point, but it doesn’t tell you whether a creator’s audience overlaps with yours, whether people actually engage with their content, or whether they’re a natural fit for your brand. And with more brands investing in creator marketing, finding someone who can genuinely connect with your audience matters more than finding the biggest account in the category.

Before reaching out, look beyond the follower count:

• Start with your campaign goal and define what you need the creator to deliver.
• Look at who their audience actually is and whether it overlaps with yours.
• Check engagement and the quality of conversations around their content.
• Use social listening to see how people talk about the creator outside their own posts.
• Look at their previous brand partnerships for potential conflicts or mismatches.
• Check for suspicious engagement or inflated metrics before signing anything.
• Don’t overlook your own brand advocates. Some of your most natural creators may already be in your audience.

The biggest creator isn’t necessarily the one your brand needs. Fit is doing a lot more work than follower count.

Head to Dash Social for more.

Another AI writing tool? Sure. But this one actually follows you around.

TextCortex is a browser extension that brings AI tools directly into the websites and apps you already use. Highlight text to rewrite, expand, summarize, translate, or change its tone, or use its AI agent to draft emails, research, and create content.

It also learns from your writing style and lets you connect your own knowledge, so the output can feel a little less like generic AI doing generic AI things.

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.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show to explore AI’s impact on entry-level marketing jobs—and the potential talent pipeline crisis that could follow.

Companies are already hiring fewer junior employees as AI takes over foundational tasks. But those “boring” tasks are also where marketers develop judgment, critical thinking, strategic instincts, and creative voice.

So what does an entry-level marketing job look like when AI can handle much of the routine work? And how do we make sure we aren’t optimizing ourselves into a future shortage of experienced marketers?

Shannon breaks down the entry-level talent crisis, the rise of AI-native marketers, the importance of mentorship and apprenticeship, and what young marketers can do to build real expertise in an AI-first world.

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• Microdramas Are Taking Over Marketing (10:43)
• Meta Muse Will Change How We Use the Internet (11:53)
• AI CEOs Want to Slow Down. The AI Race Won’t. (11:39)
• Reddit Is Changing SEO & AI Search (10:55)
• 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)

🎙️ 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.

What if you could actually see your life speeding away?

For Brazil’s National Traffic Week, DETRAN-GO uses AI to make that idea literal. The film shows a person getting behind the wheel and rapidly aging as soon as they accelerate aggressively, turning speeding into a visual countdown of sorts.

The faster they drive, the faster their life seems to disappear. Until they hit the brakes, slow down, and the aging stops.

A pretty unsettling way to remind drivers that when you rush through traffic, you might be rushing through more than just the road.

Volkswagen, 1975