🤖 OpenAI moves to make ChatGPT Ads more measurable and visual.

🛍️ TikTok rolls out an AI shopping assistant and one-click checkout.

🎵 Instagram adds AI songs to DMs.

⚖️ States are rewriting the rules of social media.

👕 A guide to creating successful brand merch.

Stop treating TikTok as a standalone social channel and start treating it as part of a larger content ecosystem. The goal isn’t to go viral, but to build a repeatable system that turns attention into something more valuable.

That starts with understanding what TikTok is actually good at: discovery. Unlike platforms where follower count plays a bigger role in distribution, TikTok can push a single video to millions of people who have never heard of your brand. Watch time and completion rate matter more than how many followers you have.

The other big opportunity is search. TikTok is increasingly functioning like a search engine, with captions, on-screen text, spoken words, and hashtags helping determine whether content surfaces for specific queries.

So, what should brands actually do?

• Define the job: Decide whether TikTok is primarily for awareness, community, or search visibility.
• Build content pillars: Turn your brand’s existing value propositions into repeatable video themes.
• Optimize for search: Make keywords part of captions, on-screen text, and spoken content.
• Test relentlessly: Experiment with hooks, formats, lengths, and delivery styles, and let watch time tell you what works.
• Let organic content prove itself: Use successful organic posts as candidates for paid amplification through formats like Spark Ads.
• Measure beyond views: Track completion rates, shares, saves, search visibility, and ultimately business outcomes.

TikTok shouldn’t be a content lottery. Head to No Good for more.

Need a free AEO audit?

This one asks real buyer questions about your category across AI assistants and checks whether your brand gets mentioned… and who gets recommended instead.

The free version tests ChatGPT and Gemini, while the paid version adds Claude.

It also checks the less glamorous side of AI visibility: whether AI crawlers can actually read your website. That includes things like robots.txt rules, server-rendered HTML, structured data, heading structure, sitemaps, and entity consistency.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show to find out why brands are spending big to turn TikTok scrollers into soap opera addicts.

Microdramas — short, episodic video series built around characters, cliffhangers, romance, plot twists and ongoing stories — are becoming a serious marketing format. And brands like Crocs, JCPenney, Bilt, P&G and Dr Pepper are already experimenting with them.

But there’s a big question: do microdramas actually drive business results, or are brands just buying views?

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• Meta Muse Will Change How We Use the Internet (11:53)
• 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)
• Instagram’s Controversial New Logo (10:34)
• 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 reaches decision-makers at brands, agencies, SaaS companies, and startups who are actively researching solutions, evaluating vendors, and making purchasing decisions every day.

Now, we’re opening up a limited number of Friends of The Daily Carnage partnerships for brands that want to build a consistent presence with our audience, not just run a one-off ad.

Friends get discounted sponsorship inventory, priority booking, first access to unsold placements, bonus opportunities, and performance reviews throughout the year.

Partnership levels include dedicated newsletter features, premium placements, podcast pre-rolls, classified ads, social promotion, and more.

Past sponsors include Canva, HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Marketing Brew, and dozens of other leading brands.

Interested in reaching marketers who actually click? Reach out to get started!

So, it turns out Wet Ones are for your hands. And just your hands.

The brand’s new campaign turns that clarification into an elaborate joke. After research found that more than half of Americans surveyed admitted to using a hand wipe on an intimate area, Wet Ones created a campaign built around optical illusions that make hands look like… not hands.

The campaign kicked off with a fake celebrity “scandal” involving TV personality Kyle Cooke and a photo that appeared to show his bare backside. It was actually his hand.

From there, Wet Ones took the visual gag across New York City with 100 LinkNYC kiosks, 60 transit shelters, Times Square screens, wild postings, and wrapped buses.

The campaign is also getting consumers involved, inviting them to create their own “hand butt” interpretations on TikTok and Instagram.

Cracker Jack, 1955