📣 Charli XCX thinks anti-marketing is the future, and some brands are already embracing the approach.

🤖 Instagram will demote AI influencers that don’t clearly disclose they’re AI-generated.

📺 Streaming overtakes linear TV in upfront ad dollars for the first time.

🤖 AI distrust is putting humanity back in advertising.

🚗 A solar storm sent GPS readings 33 feet off, raising concerns for self-driving cars.

🧠 Anthropic’s Fable 5.1 gets cheaper and less restrictive.

📱 BlackBerry is pivoting far beyond smartphones.

Keeping an eye on competitors makes sense. But if you only study the brands in your category, you might be missing the best ideas.

Buffer’s latest roundup of competitor analysis tools makes a good point: on social media, everyone is competing for the same limited supply of attention. And sometimes the most interesting ideas are coming from industries completely unrelated to yours.

So how should you approach competitor research?

• Look beyond your category: A skincare brand doesn’t have to get all its inspiration from other skincare brands.
• Track patterns, not just posts: Look for recurring formats, topics, creative approaches, and audience behaviors.
• Compare across channels: The useful insight might be hiding in a competitor’s SEO, email, paid media, or social strategy.
• Watch AI search, too: As people use AI to discover brands and products, competitor visibility there is becoming another piece of the puzzle.
• Know what you’re actually trying to learn: Don’t pay for a massive competitive intelligence platform if all you need is social engagement benchmarking.

The goal isn’t to copy your competitors. It’s to figure out what they’re doing, what everyone else is doing, and where there’s an opportunity to do something different.

Head to Buffer for the tools.

You have an idea. Now test it.

Optimizely is an experimentation and digital experience platform designed to help teams create, test, and optimize digital experiences. You can experiment with different versions of content and experiences, learn what performs best, and use those insights to improve the customer journey.

It’s built for marketers and teams that would rather test an assumption than spend six months arguing about it.

Because sometimes the best way to find out what works is to actually try it.

🎙️ 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.
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Don’t miss the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show to find out why the new Instagram logo has drawn Internet ire and divided the design community.

Who gets permission to be experimental? What’s more important: legibility or personality? Why does the public’s tend to hate design choices they’ll later fight to death to preserve?

🎙️ Plus, catch up on Season 2:

• 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)
• 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)
• 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.

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What do you get when AI meets a 63-year-old piece of football history? A goal nobody had ever seen… until now.

Vodafone and Borussia Dortmund have used AI to reconstruct the first-ever Bundesliga goal, scored by BVB’s Timo Konietzka in 1963. No video or photos of the moment existed, so the team pieced it together using eyewitness memories, archival reports, historical match data, weather models, and even a reenactment by BVB’s U-19 team.

The result is “The Unseen Goal,” a documentary that brings one of German football’s most iconic moments to life — complete with the stadium atmosphere and details of the original match.

Because apparently, AI can now give football fans something even history books couldn’t: a replay.

Northwest Airlines, 1950