Be in The Know
👋 We’re taking a short holiday break, but we’ll be back in your inbox on Dec. 29. 🍾
🪦 15 things the ad industry lost in 2025.
📊 LinkedIn launches personalized “Year in Review” summaries.
🇺🇸 TikTok agrees to U.S. joint venture with a January deadline.
🛍️ In turn, TikTok Shop offers incentives to new sellers.
🚨 LinkedIn job scams go global.
🎧 Listerine partners with Twitch creators to turn mouthwashing sounds into music.
A New Playbook for 2026
‘Tis the season to tweak your current digital marketing strategy for 2026.
The center of gravity is shifting from keywords to intent, and from isolated channels to orchestrated systems. Discovery now happens inside AI assistants, social feeds, short-form video, and connected TV, often all before a user ever types a query.
Nowadays, AI-generated answers synthesize sources. Social platforms behave like search engines. Video collapses the funnel. Whew.
Here’s a playbook that aligns across brand, media, and performance (not channel-by-channel optimization):
- Shift from keywords to intent: Optimize for questions, entities, and use cases.
- Design for AI discovery: Structure content for AI summaries using GEO, AEO, schema, and clear answers.
- Treat social as search: Optimize captions, scripts, hashtags, and series for TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest.
- Make video a commerce engine: Short-form video now drives awareness and conversion, especially with native checkout.
- Use AI, but keep human POV: Allow AI accelerate research and production but don’t let it replace judgment or voice.
- Build privacy-first measurement: First- and zero-party data, modeled conversions, and clean-room attribution are table stakes.
- Integrate CTV into performance: CTV is now measurable, targetable, and connected to search, social, and CRM loops.
- Unify marketing and sales: CRM, media, and content must operate as one system driven by intent signals.
Take a closer look at this playbook at Entrepreneur.
Q for You
How are you finding the new look and feel of The Daily Carnage?
Get your free SEO health audit in seconds
You’ve optimized your keywords. You’ve published fresh content. And yet your rankings are stuck in SEO purgatory while your competitor’s mediocre blog owns page one!
Siteimprove’s Free SEO Checker scans any page instantly and surfaces the exact issues killing your visibility.
All the technical gremlins that make bots bounce and humans click away.
Just drop in a URL, and get a full diagnostic in seconds.
What Did I Just Watch?
The Secret Level agency is back with A Very AI Yule Log 2.
The video clocks in at over 1 hour and 45 minutes. It’s less a cozy sensory experience to be played in the background, more an unhinged AI showcase set to AI-generated holiday music.
There’s continuous festive chaos, built from 630 distinct 10-second scenes generated with Kling 2.6. It’s equal parts unpredictable, surreal, and oddly hypnotic.
We didn’t watch the whole thing… you’re on your own there.
