🤖 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, “GLP-1s are Disrupting Every Sector,” to learn how consumer demand and behavior is changing at a biological level and leading to booms in some sectors and busts in others.

Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• 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.

“The Daily Carnage was the newsletter that brought us the most meaningful demo clicks and new trials.” — Digital Summit

“Open rate was nearly 50% and CTR was relatively high, especially considering this newsletter’s audience was likely being exposed to our event for the first time.” — Adweek

Hop on our 2026 sponsorship calendar to get your content in front of 25,000 marketers.

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 2.8 Discussion: “How has your sector been affected by GLP-1s, directly or indirectly? Has the high-protein trend hit your desk? How do you think this moment has impacted consumer desire and appetite? Let us know!”

Spalding, 1900