Do Ya Know
Which brand famously had to reverse its rebrand after just a few weeks?
Trending Stories
CULTURE
🌍 The best and worst countries for women ranked by women’s rights and equality.
🎒 Gen Alpha is reshaping back-to-school spending.
💘 Gen Z is turning Meetup into a dating strategy to fight loneliness.
🎤 Dolly Parton’s iconic ads are worth a rewatch.
BRANDING
🍔 A&W is redesigning its restaurants and trying not to become the next Cracker Barrel.
🎃 Fanta is turning Halloween into a repeatable brand platform with its own spooky universe.
📰 Ann Taylor is making a brand comeback with Substack and a fall fashion blitz.
👗 Zara overtakes Nike — could AI personalization be the next brand-building channel?
MARKETING
👩💻 How to hire freelance help when you’re a one-person studio.
📊 Marketers don’t trust the data shaping their budgets.
⚽ The Premier League is making a big U.S. soccer push with a new campaign.
🏥 In healthcare advertising, relevance is the new reach.
SOCIAL
🤖 LinkedIn says its AI slop button is working.
📱 Instagram’s head denies stalling its teen “Take a Break” feature despite a slow rollout.
What We Learned
Monday: Google Search is changing fast, from spam updates and AI Overviews to new source preferences. Marketers should monitor rankings, think beyond traditional links, build trusted sources, and diversify AI visibility as the search landscape becomes less predictable. So, here are a few lessons from Search Engine Journal.
Tuesday: AI is reshaping marketing alongside changes in search, social platforms, consumer behavior, and everyday tools. With so much evolving at once, marketers need to stay curious, understand what’s actually changing, and use experience to separate lasting shifts from passing trends. New technology can be valuable, but its usefulness matters more than its novelty. Staying current is less about following everything and more about recognizing which changes are worth paying attention to. Get the full scoop at Carney.
Wednesday: Creators are becoming a bigger part of how brands build relationships with audiences, and YouTube offers opportunities that go beyond one-off sponsored videos. Marketers can benefit from longer-term partnerships, a closer look at the creator’s wider business, and collaborations that give creators room to keep their own voice. With YouTube’s focus on longer-form storytelling, brands can also build partnerships that feel more connected to the creator’s content and community. here’s a useful guide.
Thursday: Shannon breaks down Instagram’s controversial new logo and what the backlash says about modern brand design — from experimentation and legibility to personality and the rise of AI-generated aesthetics.
🎙️ Don’t miss “Instagram’s Controversial New Logo” now streaming everywhere.
Ep #2.15: Instagram’s Controversial New Logo
- Logo design in the age of AI slop
…And the public’s tendency to hate design choices they’ll later fight to death to preserve (RIP skeumorphic Instagram camera icon from 2010).
🎙️ Don’t miss “Instagram’s Controversial New Logo” now streaming on:
Join The Carnage Community 🤝
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Connect and network with over 20,000 marketers to get (and give) advice, feedback, support, and LOLs.
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😎 See ya there.
Pre-Roll Sponsorships Now Available ⭐
🎙️ The Daily Carnage Show is growing!
So, we’re excited to share a new sponsorship opportunity.
Book a Pre-Roll Ad at the top the episode with your preferred script, on-screen text, and link in description.
🎧 Podcast advertising is one of the highest-performing brand channels:
- 60%+ of listeners say they’ve searched for a product after hearing it on a podcast.
- Podcast ads consistently outperform display ads on engagement and recall.
- Pre-roll ads are among the most-heard placements, with the strongest completion rates.
🗣️ This is your opportunity to reach a highly engaged audience of marketers, creatives, and strategists when they’ve got their listening ears on.
Interested in sponsoring an upcoming episode? Reach out and let’s build something together.
🕒 Agency Office Hours with Carney
Got a marketing problem you’re trying to solve? Need a second opinion? Wondering whether a new platform, AI tool, campaign idea, or strategy is worth pursuing?
Every Friday, we’re clocking in for Agency Office Hours sessions: 30-minute sessions for Daily Carnage readers to chat with the Carney team.
Bring your questions. We’ll bring our experience.
Whether you’re trying to improve performance, navigate industry changes, troubleshoot a campaign, or simply sanity-check an idea, we wanna hear what you’ve got going on.
No pitches. No obligations. No sales deck. Seriously.
Just a free 30-minute conversation with the team behind The Daily Carnage.
👉 Reserve your Office Hours session now.
Ads from The Past
Max Factor, 1967
Did Ya Know
Answer: B) Tropicana.
In 2009, Tropicana replaced its iconic orange-and-straw packaging with a much more minimalist design, and customers hated it. Sales dropped nearly 20% in less than two months, costing the company tens of millions of dollars before PepsiCo pulled the redesign and brought the old look back. It became one of the classic examples of how much emotional value can live inside a familiar visual identity — which brings us to our latest The Daily Carnage Show, where Shannon takes a closer look at Instagram’s controversial new logo and asks what happens when a brand changes something people already feel attached to.
