Also, what should I wear to that baby shower this weekend? Oh and I had an argument with my boyfriend yesterday. What should I do? And also, can you help me process my childhood trauma? Andandand. With how convenient and ever-available AI is, some of us are outsourcing a little too much these days. Not only that, but we’re outsourcing all our decision-making to chatbots rather than using them as a sparring partner. So, before it’s too late, we’ve got to decide whether we’re going to use AI to sharpen our thinking or if we’re ok letting these tools dull it.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

And it’s clear you haven’t just lost them. You’ve lost the deal.

Well, that doesn't have to be you anymore. Because in this 90-minute session taught by Nathan James, Executive Creative Director at The Attention Seeker, you’ll learn the real art of selling subjective ideas (from someone who’s worked with some of the world’s biggest brands).

If you want to know how to:

✅ Keep the room hooked from your first sentence to the final slide
✅ Nail the 3-nod method that gets instant buy-in, every time
✅ Use their objections to strengthen your pitch

...this workshop is for you.

Forget “we’ll think about it.” You’ll leave this session knowing how to make every client say, “please take my money.”

Thursday, 4 Dec | 8:30 - 10am NZT | $49

Even though, I know, sometimes it feels like chasing your tail, trying to catch fog with a net, and balancing on a tight rope all at once. Fear not, however. Because a pretty little thing called data exists.

Comprehensive and reliable data. Which is exactly what I’m about to give (via the Digital 2026: Global Overview Report.) You’re so welcome x

Turns out your future customer is stalking you on social before they even think about converting. That means your “we’ll just post when we feel like it” attitude won’t cut it anymore. Whether it’s on Instagram, LinkedIn or TikTok, the brand narrative (true or embellished) is playing a key role in shaping purchase decisions (see, told you.) If you’re not proactively shaping that narrative, someone else is, and you may not like what they’re saying. Get to it first.

Soooo, forget the myth of “everyone’s swapping platforms daily.” Social audience overlap is very real. The report shows that major shares of users are on multiple platforms. For example, 81.8% of TikTok users are also on Facebook, while only 34.8% of those same TikTok users are on Snapchat. With the average user engaging with 6.75 platforms a month - whatever that .75 is, idk, but the point being, your strat can’t treat each platform like a standalone silo. Audiences bounce around, so focusing on one shiny platform is stupid.

Not surprising, but a reminder that your audience is basically glued to a tiny screen in their palm. According to the stat, 96% of internet users go online via mobile, while only ~60% do via desktop. Again, not surprising. But if your brand’s social content looks crisp on laptop but is a nightmare on phone… you’re shooting yourself in the foot. I shouldn’t have to tell you that you need to optimise for mobile contexts: people scrolling in transit, while waiting for coffee, half-asleep in bed. You get the gist.

Anyway. 2026. Don’t chase trends. Master the basics. Peace out x

-Sophie Randell, Writer

He said the better your leadership skills are, the better you’ll be able to utilise AI.

That’s when I realised a new kind of class divide is emerging, not between the people who use AI and those who don’t, but between the people who know how to direct it and those who get directed by it. It’s what I call The Prompt Gap.

We’re entering an era where everyone technically has access to the same tools, but not everyone has the ability to get something worthwhile out of them. It’s not about being “good at AI.” It’s about being good at thinking.

The clearer your thought process, the better your result. And just like with any human teammate, if your instructions are vague, you’ll end up with a half-baked mess that only makes sense in your head. (And definitely can’t be used on a slide deck.)

That’s why the people who thrive alongside AI aren’t the ones who offload everything to it and call it a day; they’re the ones who know how to collaborate with it.

Most people think prompting is just knowing which words to use. But the real skill is knowing what you actually want before you start typing. That’s a thinking discipline, not a tech one.

If you’ve ever managed a team, you’ll recognise the pattern: people who give great briefs get great results. It’s the oldest rule in the playbook. People who don’t spend the rest of the week cleaning up chaos.

If you’re clear, contextual, and decisive, it becomes a creative accelerator. If you’re lazy or fuzzy, it becomes a mirror reflecting your confusion right back at you, but faster and more convoluted.

That’s why I think of prompting as a leadership exercise. It’s about learning to think in structure: here’s what I need, why it matters, and what the success of said thing looks like. The more competent you are at articulating those things, the better you’ll perform in an AI-powered world, because you’ll know how to steer the ship, not just sit in the passenger seat yelling “make it better.”

There’s a creeping kind of cognitive decay happening, what I lovingly call “AI brain rot.” The more you let the model do your thinking for you, the less capable you become of doing it yourself.

Shortcuts are great until they start rewiring your instincts. If you always rely on AI to summarise, ideate, or structure your thoughts, you slowly lose the ability to hold complexity in your head. The muscle of original thought: pattern recognition, synthesis, creative leaps etc, starts to weaken.

And when that goes, so does your competitive edge.

The goal isn’t to eliminate cognitive effort—it’s to reallocate it. You let AI handle the mechanical stuff so your brain can focus on strategy, context, and creative judgment.

If you skip the thinking altogether, you’re not collaborating with AI. You’re being replaced by it.

We spent decades worshipping technical skills like coding, analytics, UX design. But as AI eats up more of the technical work, the premium shifts to something much older and rarer: communication.

Because AI doesn’t think for you (at least, it shouldn’t). It should scale your clarity. And clarity, in this case, comes from discipline, curiosity, and emotional intelligence. All things that can’t be automated.

For the first time in history, we’re watching the great flattening of skill hierarchies. Everyone can now produce, edit, analyse, and design at some baseline level. But only a few can orchestrate: to take a messy idea and guide it into something coherent and valuable.

That’s the new elite class: the AI-literate thinkers. The ones who use prompting as a cognitive tool, not a crutch.

The future doesn’t belong to the people who know the fanciest AI tools. It belongs to the ones who know how to brief.

Learn to think clearly, ask precisely, and refine relentlessly. That’s the work now. Because as it turns out, the great equaliser of technology has made one skill matter more than ever: the ability to ask better.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

Whether that’s design tweaks, analytics checks, or yet another “quick” brainstorm. The audio comes from T-Pain’s “I'm Sprung”, specifically the part that goes “you do, you do…”  which perfectly matches that moment when you try to convince yourself (and everyone else) you don’t need something... even though you 100% do.

It’s a fun, low-effort, high-relatability trend that brands and creators can easily jump on. Make it niche to your audiences and you’ve got gold.

Some of my favourite examples:

Film a selfie video with on-screen text saying “You don’t need (something related to your niche) every day” followed by “The voices in my head” when the lyric “you do, you do…” hits.

A few ideas to get you started:

-Nico Mendoza, Intern

😲WTF: No Licence Is Wild!!
❤How wholesome: i love spiderman
😊Soooo satisfying: Pizza Shop ASMR
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Buffalo Chicken Pizza

Hey Joe,

It sounds like you're being asked to create more content than you can, given your time or budget constraints. Those are obviously limited resources, so you'll have to prioritise based on the larger goals of the organisation. One way to do this is to create a flowchart you can use to determine whether you should fulfil a request or not. This should include a series of questions around the purpose of the content, whether there is a budget to produce it, and how it aligns with wider priorities. This will help you say no to requests that aren't going to serve those goals.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.