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🤖 Google’s cringey Olympics ad for Gemini is catching backlash.

📉 Lululemon paused sales of a new collection following consumer complaints. Stock plummeted.

🤷 Report: 67% of marketers say lack of training is primary barrier to AI adoption.

🎨 High-low culture: Meet the artist behind those viral oil paintings of popular foods.

♟️ Report: How 16 companies are dominating the world’s Google search results.

💰 Infographic: The largest company in every sector of the S&P 500.

▶️ YouTube’s war on ad blockers continues, now making ads truly unskippable.

💬 X reminds advertisers “there’s no substitute” for real-time sports conversation amid competition.

🕵️ What advertisers need to know about the kids’ privacy bills passing the Senate.

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Monday: Meet Kimberly Bailey, Head of Marketing at Alpaca and OG subscriber (’16) of The Daily Carnage. She leads marketing efforts at Alpaca, an Omaha-based edtech startup on a mission to make school the happiest place to work. We caught up with Kimberly to hear more about the content strategy that grew her professional community to over 2,100 connections on LinkedIn. Here’s what we learned.

Tuesday: Matthew Fenton, founder of Winning Solo, shares his 10 major fails as a freelancer of 25 years. Plus, everything he did right.

• According to our poll, 31% of marketers are freelancing full-time, 20% supplement their work with freelance projects, and 21% take on minimal freelance work. 24% are not currently freelancing, and 4% have gotten out of the game for good.

Wednesday: Google is testing various ad placements, such as under featured snippets and within organic results, which could potentially capture more attention than traditional placements. Data shows Google generally places 2 ads mixed with organic results on desktop, and one ad mixed with organic results on mobile. Check out the report from Search Engine Land.

Thursday: Research shows that people are more likely to take your desired action if you emphasize an already completed step. For example, customers visited a coffee shop more frequently when they were given a loyalty card that started with existing progress. In general, acknowledge when your users complete trivial tasks, and give them a little head start on progress.

Michael posted: “I don’t want to but I need to pick up my DTC game. Any materials people can suggest?”

Taryn posted: “Anyone have a Pinterest account for their brand that they wanna show off? Looking for some inspo and would love to see what you’re doing.”

Andrea posted: “Looking for the best Facebook Ad training for local service businesses. Something on the high sophistication, paid, including trouble shooting and optimization.”

Joy posted: “Are we ready to be done with Meh-ta yet? *Sigh*.”

• 🚀 CAPI isn’t the answer. Scale with proof, scale with AdBeacon. AdBeacon is an ad optimization & attribution platform powered by first-party data and focused on ecommerce.
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Place a Classified Ad in a Friday edition of The Daily Carnage for just $99.

Ingredients

• 1 oz. of grenadine syrup
• 1/2 oz. Cointreau
• 1 oz. blue curaçao
• 1 oz. Midori
• 1/2 oz. of sweetened lime juice

Steps

1. Pour ingredients slowly, in order listed, into a chilled martini glass.

Recipe by Daily’s Cocktails

Answer: 1948 London Olympics.

The IOC congress nixed the artistic competitions in 1949. But if the board would like to entertain some contemporary additions, we’d humbly recommend a digital marketing competition, which feels like an Olympic sport most days of the week.