AI

💰 OpenAI turns on CPA ads inside ChatGPT.

🏷️ YouTube introduces more prominent AI labels.

☕ Starbucks retired its internal AI system after a flop.

📿 Meta is reportedly developing an AI pendant.

🔓 Hackers got Meta AI to give them Instagram account access.

SOCIAL

👥 Meta expands 13+ content settings for teens globally.

📱 Can we take the doom out of scrolling?

📺 Meta tests “Series” for episodic Reels on Instagram and Facebook.

COMMERCE

🛒 Shopify outage disrupts stores, checkouts and admin access.

🛍️ Reddit expands Shopify integration to all advertisers.

🎆 Brands are approaching Fourth of July campaigns cautiously.

BRANDING

💘 M&Ms gamifies the Love Island USA viewing experience.

🥜 Snickers makes a pointed dig at Reese’s.

🥤 Schweppes reinvents itself.

Monday: The highest-performing newsletters achieve 55%+ open rates by becoming part of their readers’ routines. That comes from consistently delivering valuable content to a well-defined audience, building trust over time, and showing up on a predictable schedule. The most successful publishers also focus on concise subject lines, audience segmentation, actionable insights, and creating opportunities for readers to engage through replies and referrals. Read more from Beehiiv.

Tuesday: Affiliate marketing is no longer just about referral links and last-click attribution. Today, creator-led commerce is reshaping the channel, with trust, credibility, and audience relationships driving results. As brands look for measurable ROI and consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people they follow, affiliate partnerships have become a scalable way to turn genuine influence into performance. Check out in Because of Marketing.

Wednesday: Posting more often doesn’t automatically lead to better engagement. Social Insider found that the formats generating the strongest results aren’t always the ones brands publish most frequently, with Instagram carousels, Facebook Reels, and LinkedIn native documents outperforming many standard post types. Rather than chasing volume, the data suggests that consistency, experimentation, and content quality are the real drivers of performance. See the full findings from Social Insider.

Thursday: Growing on social media isn’t as unpredictable as it seems. Dan Koe argues that the biggest drivers of growth are creating content around proven topics and building authentic relationships with other creators. By contributing a unique perspective to conversations people already care about and actively engaging within your niche, you can create a more consistent path to audience growth. Read the full analysis in Future/Proof by Dan Koe.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show, “The Future of Google Search,” to learn more about Google’s plans to replace the search box with 24/7 AI-powered information agents and interactive “Generative UI” that builds mini-apps and custom widgets directly on your results page.

What does that mean for advertising, for SEO, for the Internet as we know it?

Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• 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.

Can you solve this puzzle? 📱

Weigh in on The Daily Carnage Subreddit:

• The Daily Carnage Show Ep 2.9 Discussion: “If AI agents become the primary interface to knowledge, what happens to the humans and businesses that knowledge originally came from? What does it mean for the internet to quietly transition from an open ecosystem of destinations into a closed ecosystem of gate-kept answers? Are we speeding toward a future where people stop visiting the web directly? If that behavior ends, we ever be able to rebuild it?”

🎙️ The Daily Carnage Show is growing!

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VW, 1968

Answer: B. The first spam complaint

On May 3, 1978, marketer Gary Thuerk sent an unsolicited promotional email to hundreds of ARPANET users to advertise a new computer system. Recipients weren’t thrilled, and the message quickly generated complaints, earning its place in history as the first documented spam email. Ironically, despite the backlash, the campaign reportedly generated millions of dollars in sales.