BRANDS

🧱 LEGO is winning over adults with gaming and F1 sets.

🌯 Chipotle embraces its chronically online social strategy.

🦉 Duolingo’s Duo the Owl is getting an animated series.

MARKETING

📊 Meet the biggest advertisers of 2026.

💼 Marketing hiring intentions shift in Q4.

📺 Meta wants to sell marketers their old TV strategy back.

TECHNOLOGY

👎 YouTube may be hiding its dislike button.

📱 Apple’s iPhone Duo could be its next big moment.

HOLIDAYS

🎃 Halloween consumer trends are shaping 2026 marketing.

🎁 Target launches a Gift-Giving Academy for the holidays.

Monday: Strong fundraising results don’t automatically translate into loyal donors. Nonprofits need to think beyond the first contribution by creating thoughtful follow-ups, sharing tangible impact, respecting communication preferences, and offering ways to stay involved between appeals. Long-term growth depends on the relationships built after someone gives. Give donors a reason to stick around.

Tuesday: AI can make customer service faster, but automation needs an exit strategy. Let bots handle routine questions, give human agents the context they need, and make escalation easy when customers need more personal support. Know when your chatbot should hand things over.

Wednesday: Landing page best practices are useful starting points, but they aren’t universal rules. PPC Hero’s testing examples show how audience preferences and buying behavior can challenge conventional advice. Use your own data, customer feedback, and business outcomes to decide what actually works. Put the landing page playbook to the test.

Thursday: Some of the most persistent SEO rules aren’t rules at all. Search Engine Watch challenges common assumptions about AI-generated content, keyword density, word count, publishing frequency, and authority metrics. Before changing your strategy, make sure the advice you’re following is supported by evidence rather than repetition. Find out which SEO “rules” you can retire.

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.

The Daily Carnage reaches decision-makers at brands, agencies, SaaS companies, and startups who are actively researching solutions, evaluating vendors, and making purchasing decisions every day.

Now, we’re opening up a limited number of Friends of The Daily Carnage partnerships for brands that want to build a consistent presence with our audience, not just run a one-off ad.

Friends get discounted sponsorship inventory, priority booking, first access to unsold placements, bonus opportunities, and performance reviews throughout the year.

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All treats, a few tricks. Find four groups of four connected words.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show, here’s what we’re covering:

🔒 Apple’s secret blocklist: How Safari’s restrictions work and which ad tech companies have been affected.

📉 The impact on advertisers and publishers: Why disruptions to ad delivery and audience signals could affect campaign performance, publisher revenue, and programmatic advertising.

📊 The measurement problem: Why winning an ad auction doesn’t always mean an ad actually appeared on a user’s screen.

⚖️ Privacy vs. platform power: What happens when the company controlling the browser also operates an advertising business?

🛠️ What marketers should do next: Audit your ad tech dependencies, verify campaign delivery, strengthen your first-party data strategy, and ask vendors about their contingency plans.

Apple’s approach raises a bigger question for the open web: How do we protect user privacy while maintaining the infrastructure that supports digital advertising?

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• AI Is Killing Entry-Level Marketing Jobs (12:55)
• Microdramas Are Taking Over Marketing (10:43)
• 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)
• 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.

Game Boy, 1997

Answer: C) REI. The outdoor retailer launched #OptOutside by giving its 12,000 employees a paid day off and encouraging customers to head outside, too. Closing stores on one of retail’s biggest shopping days was a bold way to put its brand values into practice. What started as a holiday campaign became a tradition—and REI made the commitment permanent in 2022.