Do Ya Know?
Today's opening ceremony for the Winter Games in Milan will feature THIS unifying theme:
Trending Stories
THE BIG GAMES
🏈 Super Bowl ads are marketing to the algorithms.
❄️ What the Winter Games reveal about modern attention.
🍦 Dairy Queen teases Taylor (&) Swift halftime show.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
🧠 Google Chrome introduces side panel for Gemini 3.
🤖 Anthropic says Claude will remain ad-free, unlike ChatGPT.
THE TIKTOK TRANSITION
📧 Read the email TikTok sent to advertisers after the US rollover screwed up campaigns.
- 💡 According to our poll, 61% of subscribers were affected by the outage.
🚀 UpScrolled’s founder says the social network has zoomed past 2.5M users.
📉 But downloads of TikTok alternatives have since slowed in the US.
TRENDING
🍟 McDonald’s will drop free McNugget Caviar kits on Feb 10. Yeah, really.
🐴 This crying horse plushy is going viral because… relatable.
🎧 Why wired headphones are swinging back into style.
- 💡 According to our poll, 64% of marketers are all about the wires.
📬 What makes a newsletter worth opening?
🚗 The rise of in-car ads.
What We Learned
Monday: Ogilvy Social.Lab’s 2026 Social Trends Report, “Social with Substance & the Return to Real,” describes a shift from the classic attention economy toward “intention economy,” where brands earn relevance by respecting people’s time, intelligence, and values, rather than interrupting them with noise. These are the 5 “Rules of Realness” brands should embrace in 2026.
Tuesday: Instead of a publishing traditional article, publishers are increasingly publishing info that can flow across formats and surfaces and be reshaped into summaries, audio, video, chat responses, or personalized briefings in real time, based on who’s consuming it, when, and how. This is liquid content. Here’s what it unlocks… and what it complicates.
Wednesday: Growing your LinkedIn audience starts with optimizing your profile so the right people can find and connect with you. LinkedIn profiles with a clear value proposition get more views and invites. From there, posting consistently, typically two to five times per week, keeps you visible and signal-boosts your expertise to the algorithm. Here’s a quick list of growth levers to get started.
Thursday: Deciding how often to publish a new podcast episode? Bumper recommends using your average episodes per verified listener as a deciding metric. This measures how many episodes a typical listener plays over a given time period (weekly or monthly) based on actual platform engagement, not just downloads. Here’s a quick overview to help you think about frequency.
The Conversation
Kaylan posted: “I’m working on standardizing UTMs. Have you done something similar before? If so, do you have any examples or codes you’d be willing to share? I’d love to see how you’ve structured things.”
Bren posted: “Does anyone have a governance policy outlining what non-digital/non-creative staff can expect when they request content or design changes? Put another way, how are you controlling incoming web requests to ‘make the logo bigger’ etc.”
Christine posted: “Has anyone used IVOREY.io?
A friend of mine is launching a business and was originally looking at Squarespace + other softwares but this is all in one. Part of me shies away from anything that is all-in-one cause it feels like there’s a catch.”
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