PLATFORM UPDATES

🗺️ You can now buy ads in Apple Maps.

▶️ YouTube is changing how it counts views.

📧 Google gives political emails a lane around spam filters.

🍇 Vine-inspired Divine brings back six-second loops — and bans AI.

GEN ALPHA

🤖 OpenAI debuts ChatGPT for Teens.

🏆 Report: Amazon and Nike reign supreme with Gen Alpha teens.

🎒 Urban Outfitters launched its first back-to-school campaign.

BACKLASH

🧴 Hayden Panettiere’s death sparks renewed backlash against Neutrogena.

😂 These are all the brands dunking on Instagram’s new logo.

✈️ The creator brand trip is experiencing a midlife crisis.

🤖 AI was supposed to win people over by now. It hasn’t.

Monday: Reddit is one of those places where users can spot a corporate account instantly. But Sonos is a pretty interesting blueprint for getting Reddit right. They put a real person at the center: Keith Nieves, better known on Reddit as “Keith from Sonos.” Their human-first strategy was built around being actually useful. And when a Sonos app update triggered a wave of criticism, Keith continued his recurring office-hours sessions, created a public tracker showing what the company was fixing, and stayed engaged with the community throughout the crisis. So, here are a few lessons from Sonos.

Tuesday: ChatGPT ads work a lot more like search advertising than traditional social ads. OpenAI’s self-serve ad platform is now available to advertisers, with campaigns targeting conversations where a product or service may be relevant. If you’re thinking about experimenting, here’s a useful seven-step guide.

Wednesday: A new Kantar report analyzed more than 15,000 sponsored creator posts across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube and found that platform engagement aligned with brand-building potential only about one-third of the time. Among highly engaged posts, fewer than 1 in 5 showed strong potential to build a brand, while only about 1 in 8 showed strong potential for short-term sales. So what should we be looking for?

Thursday: ChatGPT is becoming another place where people discover products, compare options, and make buying decisions. Now, marketers can pay to show up in those conversations, too. PPC Hero tested ChatGPT Ads to see what the new channel actually looks like in practice, from targeting and creative to performance and measurement. What should marketers know before jumping in?

Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show to dive into the dark patterns that have been a UX and marketing problem for years. Now, they’re increasingly becoming a legal one.

In this episode of The Daily Carnage Show, we’re looking at Meta’s growing legal scrutiny over the design of Facebook and Instagram—and what it could mean for marketers, UX designers, and anyone building digital products.

We break down what deceptive design and “dark patterns” actually are, including manipulative defaults, difficult cancellation flows, buried information, infinite scroll, autoplay, and other design choices that can steer users toward decisions they might not otherwise make.

We’ll also look at the bigger question behind the current litigation: When does persuasion become manipulation, and when can a company become legally responsible for the way its product is designed?

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• 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)
• Brand vs. Planet: The Marketer’s AI Footprint (12:14)
• The Future of Google Search (9:56)
• GLP-1s are Disrupting Every Sector (9:56)
• Transgressive OOH (18:45)
• Your Brain on AI (12:33)
• Ethics in the AI Era (18:33)

🎙️ Now streaming on Youtube, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music.

Can you solve this puzzle? 👜

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🎙️ 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.

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• 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.

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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.

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Just a free 30-minute conversation with the team behind The Daily Carnage.

👉 Reserve your Office Hours session now.

American Dairy Association, 1958

Answer: Honeypotting.

Who’s using this deception tactic to torture bots? Mostly a small group of publishers and e-commerce brands.

As reported by Digiday, “instead of just blocking them, the aim is to make sure each request costs those scrapers real money while yielding less useful data.”