🌯 Chipotle hands its campaign to 100 creators.

🛍️ Target brings back ’90s nostalgia with dELiA*s.

💰 Dr. Squatch bets $1M on experiences, not ads.

🍹 How Aperol turned the spritz into a $900M brand.

📱 Instagram is under investigation for deceptive design practices.

🌐 A quick look at social media’s biggest innovations.

💄 Ulta Beauty is turning beauty into big growth.

Google Ads is taking more campaign decisions off marketers’ plates. That makes one thing increasingly important: making sure Google knows what a good conversion actually looks like.

As bidding, targeting, budgets, and creative combinations become more automated, the data you feed the system has more influence over what it optimizes for. A form submission might look like a conversion in Google Ads, but if half those leads never become customers, you’re teaching the algorithm the wrong lesson.

So what should marketers measure?

• Lead quality: Track which leads become qualified opportunities, not just who fills out a form.
• Downstream outcomes: Connect ad conversions to appointments, closed deals, revenue, or whatever actually matters to the business.
• Conversion value: Give Google more context when some conversions are worth significantly more than others.
• Baseline performance: Document your current results before major campaign or automation changes so you have something meaningful to compare against.

The more Google automates, the less useful it is to simply ask whether your campaigns are hitting their CPA or ROAS targets. Make sure you’re measuring what actually matters before Google starts optimizing for it.

Head to Search Engine Journal for more.

Want to build something without spending hours setting up a development environment?

Play with Putty is a Google Labs experiment for collaborative vibe coding. It lets you work with others to turn ideas into working creations through a more visual, interactive coding experience.

It’s designed for experimenting, building, and playing around with code together — making it a fun way to go from “what if we tried this?” to something you can actually see and interact with.

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.

• Who gets permission to be experimental?
• The importance of legibility vs. personality
• Logo design in the age of AI slop

…And the public’s tendency to hate design choices they’ll later fight to death to preserve (RIP skeumorphic Instagram camera icon from 2010).

🎙️ Don’t miss “Instagram’s Controversial New Logo” now streaming on:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Amazon Music
• 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.

What if the hardest roads could remind you that you’ve already overcome worse?

Tyre brand Dunlop is turning South Africa’s historic roads into a powerful reminder of resilience with its latest campaign, “A Difficult Road Should Never Stop Your Journey.”

The campaign highlights roads tied to pivotal moments in the country’s journey to freedom, drawing a parallel between navigating tough roads and overcoming life’s obstacles.

Because whether you’re heading toward a destination or chasing a goal, a difficult road shouldn’t be the thing that stops you.

McDonald’s, 1994