Be in The Know
📉 Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads engagement declined in 2025.
🏛️ US Senate passes bill prohibiting ads targeting minors under 17.
🤝 Google, Microsoft to continue work with blacklisted Anthropic.
🛒 Retail and grocery brands dominate ChatGPT ads.
🥊 Why so many brands are throwing shade at their competitors right now.
🔥 DoorDash has a new advertising strategy: Go viral once a month.
Ep. #2.2: Meta, McDonald’s Mukbang, and The OpenAI Mess
✨ This week on The Daily Carnage Show:
- OpenAI accepts a controversial contract with the Pentagon following Anthropic’s refusal to enable mass surveillance and autonomous killing. In the wake of the announcement, millions of users migrate from ChatGPT to Claude.
- Meta rolls out updates to creation and scheduling tools for all and restructures link click attribution to closer match Google Analytics conversion data.
- A clever campaign from a photography museum demonstrates the transgressive role of out-of-home to challenge the ways we move through time and space.
- The real reason everyone’s talking about the viral McDonald’s CEO mukbang.
- Plus, a 1986 McDonald’s ad featuring an anthropomorphic moon.
🎙️ Stream “Meta, McDonald’s Mukbang, and The OpenAI Mess” (14:41) on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube — and let us know what you think.
Q for You
Do you have a Threads content strategy?
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Stitch is an experimental tool from Google Labs that generates UI designs and front-end code for dashboards, mobile app screens, and web pages based on your natural-language description.
It can also accept sketches, screenshots, or wireframes as input and convert them into UI mockups.
Then, just export your prototypes as HTML/CSS code or editable files for tools like Figma. It’s free.
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Is That Rhine Reynolds?
We happen to love the find-a-guy-in-the-phone-book strategy for building a campaign.
And Consumer Cellular (with THE MAYOR agency) has called up a guy named Rhine Reynolds, a real store manager (and a homophone for competitor Mint Mobile’s Ryan Reynolds).
The campaign debuted with a Super Bowl commercial, “Dirt Road,” referencing the rivalry between major carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile that often advertise on dusty roads while competing over coverage claims.
In the follow-up spot, “Orange World,” Reynolds is back in a simple orange environment to reinforces the brand’s identity: authenticity over spectacle.
Good for Rhine.
Ads from The Past
Kool-Aid, 1996
