💸 Instagram will charge for AI access.

🍅 Heinz is showing bland food a red card in a social-first campaign.

🩷 Why Farmers went pink and booted J.K. Simmons.

🎯 How Amazon, Liquid I.V., and Sony tapped into streaming TV fandoms.

🍗 KFC brings back fan favorite Popcorn Chicken.

You know what you’re spending on advertising. Do you know what your competitors are investing, or how those budgets are split across channels?

Estimating competitor ad spend is more accessible than you might think.

The goal is to identify trends. Are competitors increasing investment in video? Pulling back on display? Prioritizing paid search over social? Those signals can reveal where they see opportunity and where you might have an opening.

Use competitor ad spend data to:

• Benchmark your budget against other advertisers in your market.
• Compare channel mix across display, social, video, and paid search.
• Track spending trends over time to spot seasonal pushes or strategic shifts.
• Identify competitive keywords with high traffic costs and decide whether they’re worth pursuing.
• Evaluate top-performing ads and campaigns to understand what messaging competitors are amplifying.

And combining spend estimates with ad creative, landing pages, and keyword research provides a much fuller picture of a competitor’s strategy.

Head to Semrush for more.

Goldfish eliminates the need for constantly re-explaining context, copying and pasting conversations, and repeating project details over and over.

It builds context from your activity across your Mac and makes that information available wherever you write.

Press the Option key in any text field, and it can draft replies, rewrite text, summarize long threads, or recall details from your recent work.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show, “Brand vs. Planet: The Marketer’s AI Footprint,” to learn more about the energy, water, land, and infrastructure costs behind the tech that powers your whole stack.

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• Our Picks for the 2026 Titanium Lions (13:06)
• Silent Spring: Is Rainbox Capitalism Dead? (11:41)
• The Future of Google Search (9:56)
• 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.

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 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.

Verizon is promoting its new flat-rate Simplicity Plan with help from Off Campus star Stephen Kalyn.

The now viral tongue-in-cheek spot plays like a steamy romance trailer, in which he delivers dramatic lines directly while lounging on around.

The creative team intentionally avoided calling the production a “commercial” while filming, encouraging everyone on set to treat it like premium entertainment instead of an ad.

Miller Lite, 1989