🧠 OpenAI’s latest features take direct aim at the app store model.

👗 Armani built a brand designed to outlive him — now comes the real test.

📈 Senior marketing recruitment is bouncing back, with most top roles going to external talent.

🔎 Visual SEO is changing for the AI search era.

🎬 Cakes Body is turning founder-led marketing into owned entertainment.

🥾 Dr. Martens is plotting its comeback.

📰 AI-powered content farms are raising new questions about media trust.

The old student journey was easy to draw: see an ad, visit the website, inquire, apply, enroll.

Real students were never quite that predictable. Now, the path is even more fragmented. Prospective students are discovering institutions through search, social platforms, peer communities, video, Reddit, and increasingly, AI tools. A September 2026 survey of 1,518 prospective and recently enrolled students found that 87% had used an AI tool for education research or considered doing so, while TikTok and YouTube were slightly more likely than traditional search engines to introduce respondents to a university they hadn’t previously considered.

That means education marketers need to:

• Show up across the platforms prospective students actually use.
• Understand how different channels introduce and influence consideration.
• Create content for search, social, video, communities, and AI discovery.
• Keep positioning consistent even when the format and platform change.
• Connect the dots between interactions instead of treating every channel as a separate journey.

Students may take a winding route to your institution. Your marketing system needs to keep up.

Head to Carney for more.

Need a website but don’t feel like becoming a web developer first?

Dorik lets you generate a full website with AI, then customize it with a no-code drag-and-drop editor. You can generate copy and images, choose from templates and UI blocks, and handle things like hosting, SEO, forms, and analytics in the same place.

It’s basically a website builder for people who want to build a website without making “learn to code” their next personality trait.

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.

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.

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.

🎙️ 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.

What happens when the American dream starts looking a little less dreamy?

In A Stranger’s House, director Choānn mixes archival footage with surreal imagery to explore ideas of identity, belonging, and the changing experience of living in America.

Glossy images of fashion, suburban life, and American culture sit alongside war, destruction, and political imagery, creating a pretty unsettling contrast.

It’s less of a traditional campaign film and more of a visual mood piece that leaves you with plenty to think about.

Kleneex, 1967