🇺🇸 American brands are split how to approach patriotism.

📺 Next up: dynamically inserted billboards in TV content.

📵 Majority of Americans support banning social media for kids under 16.

🎒 Back-to-school season has become a summer-long event thanks to early Prime Day.

📚 CMOs share their 2026 beach reads.

Have ya heard? TikTok is a search platform.

Nearly half of U.S. consumers now use TikTok as a search engine for everything from restaurant recommendations to product reviews and how-to tutorials.

And TikTok SEO, which used to be not much more than stuffing captions with hashtags and hopping on trending sounds, is mich more sophisticated now.

It uses a combo of spoken words, on-screen text, location data, creator reviews, comments, and AI-generated summaries to understand and rank content. New features like Local Feed, Places, and TikTok Shop also give businesses more ways to surface organically.

A few ways to improve your TikTok SEO:

• Answer real questions your audience is searching for.
• Say your target keyword out loud early in the video.
• Include keywords naturally in on-screen text and captions.
• Add relevant location details for local businesses.
• Build topic clusters instead of one-off viral posts.
• Encourage comments and creator-generated reviews to strengthen relevance.

Head to Search Engine Land for more.

Meta recently unveiled a suite of new tools for creating, optimizing, and scaling campaigns faster.

You can now generate creative variations, learn from past campaign performance, and quickly iterate on concepts.

There’s also a unified Creator Marketing Hub, which will make it easier to discover creators, manage partnerships, and turn creator content into paid ads from dashboard.

Plus, you can deploy AI-powered agents that answer questions, recommend products, and assist shoppers across Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show, “Marketing as Infrastructure: Our Cannes Titanium Lions Picks,” Shannon shares the Carney shortlist of campaigns that raised the bar and changed the game over the last year.

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• 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.

Ok, who watched the five-hour Blue Buffalo stream over the holiday weekend?

The pet food brand created the “Dog Friendliest Fireworks Show” to keep dogs calm while the real fireworks popped off.

The video swapped booming explosions for soothing sounds and fills the screen with dog-approved visuals like toys, treats, and food.

It was even developed with input from canine cognitive scientist Dr. Evan MacLean.

They rounded out the activation with real-time support on TikTok and Instagram, practical tips, product recos, and seasonal promos.

You can still pop it on for your pup… or like, a weird little workday vibe.

Sears, 1974