🤖 LinkedIn limits reach of AI posts.

📉 What Intuit’s layoffs mean for Mailchimp customers.

🎧 Spotify is doing creator memberships.

💘 Manischewitz celebrates Jewish matchmaking with reality dating series.

⚡️ Bojangles just launched an EV charging initiative.

The Influencer Marketing Factory’s Brand Deals report, which analyzes 316k+ sponsored posts across IG, TikTok, and YouTube, shows that influencer marketing has fully matured.

The creator economy is becoming more structured, performance-driven, and platform-specific.

Some of the most important insights:

• TikTok currently leads in ad disclosure compliance, with 52% of sponsored posts properly disclosed, compared to 42% on YouTube and just 29% on Instagram.
• YouTube has emerged as the strongest platform for long-term creator relationships, averaging 13.5-month partnerships and a 50.9% repeat collaboration rate.
• TikTok partnerships are far more transactional, with 71.8% of creator relationships ending after a single collaboration.
• Affiliate-first partnerships dominate YouTube, where 52.9% of deals are affiliate-based instead of flat-fee sponsorships.
• Q4 remains the busiest season for influencer campaigns, but each platform follows a different engagement rhythm, making platform-specific budget planning increasingly important.
• Brand deals now account for 12.7% of creators’ annual income, while more than half of creators reported year-over-year income growth.

Overall, brands are shifting away from vanity metrics and toward measurable, long-term creator partnerships, increasingly investing in creators who can drive conversions across more than one campaign.

Meta’s new app, Forum, is essentially a cleaner, standalone version of Facebook Groups designed to compete more directly with platforms like Reddit.

It removes Groups from the Facebook ecosystem and focuses entirely on community conversations and interest-based discussions.

Sign in with your Facebook account and your existing groups, activity, and profile automatically carry over into the app.

It also integrates Reddit-style discovery, nickname posting, and an AI moderation tools for admins.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show, “The Future of Google Search,” to learn more about Google’s plans to replace the search box with 24/7 AI-powered information agents and interactive “Generative UI” that builds mini-apps and custom widgets directly on your results page.

What does that mean for advertising, for SEO, for the Internet as we know it?

Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• GLP-1s are Disrupting Every Sector (9:56)
• Spirit Airlines 2.0: Will it Fly? (11:08)
• Major Platform Updates (8:17)
• Nike Runs into Controversy (12:19)
• Transgressive OOH (18:45)
• Your Brain on AI (12:33)
• Meta, McDonald’s Mukbang, and The OpenAI Mess (14:41)
• Ethics in the AI Era (18:33)

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

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Book a $99 Classified ad instantly, or ask us about our custom sponsorship packages tailored to your campaign objectives.

Disney and Lucasfilm’s OOH campaign in Madrid is otherworldly.

Created with Havas Creative to promote The Mandalorian and Grogu, the activation used magnetic levitation technology to transform traditional street billboards into floating “mupis,” making it look as if Grogu was using the Force to lift them.

That’ll get you some brand lift.

Weigh in on The Daily Carnage Subreddit:

• The Daily Carnage Show Ep 2.9 Discussion: “If AI agents become the primary interface to knowledge, what happens to the humans and businesses that knowledge originally came from? What does it mean for the internet to quietly transition from an open ecosystem of destinations into a closed ecosystem of gate-kept answers? Are we speeding toward a future where people stop visiting the web directly? If that behavior ends, we ever be able to rebuild it?”

Spalding, 1900