Your ATTN Please || Friday, 4 July

What do you get when you cross a shirtless Adam Levine and a Chipotle bag?

Apparently, the most successful sales day the brand’s had in years. A 3-year-old tweet mocking Levine’s tattoos just turned into Chipotle’s “Tatted Like a Chipotle Bag” campaign. And it popped off, gaining 102 million impressions, record-breaking non-peak sales, and one real tattoo (for the free burrito, obviously). Because sometimes your best campaigns come from a random viral moment no one saw coming.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MARKETING TODAY?

Chipotle gives free food to customers with tattoos, Racist AI videos go viral & Elon bans hashtags

Adam Levine's “Chipotle bag”-esque tattoos led to the brand's best sales day in years.

Three years ago, Dara Faye posted a viral tweet likening the Maroon 5 frontman’s tattoos to a Chipotle takeout bag. But I doubt she knew her hilarious take would be responsible for the “highest single-day, non-peak-hour sales volume” for the food chain. Despite it taking several years to turn the joke into a tangible piece of marketing, the “Tatted Like a Chipotle Bag” campaign appears to be a successful one. Overall, it generated 102 million social impressions and 9.2 billion “PR impressions."

The campaign approach? Anyone with any existing tattoo they were willing to show, and who lined up at one of 13 designated locations would get a buy-one-get-one offer on an entrée of their choice. For the naked babies (un-tatted folk) Chipotle offered temporary tattoos with designs that included “Chipotle is my life.” Apparently, someone even got a real tattoo just for the sake of the giveaway, stating “Free Chipotle was all I heard.” Lol.

Racist videos made with AI are going viral on TikTok.

It’s something new every day, huh? According to findings from Media Matters, a non-profit media watchdog, videos filled with racist tropes, made with Google’s AI video generation tool Veo 3 have garnered millions of views across TikTok. Much of this content targets black people. Veo 3 allows users to generate videos and audio with just a text prompt. And, obviously, there are a bunch of people who can’t be trusted being normal with technology.

Google's website states that it will “block harmful requests and results." TikTok's rules say that “hate speech and hateful behavior has no place on TikTok,” and that the platform “will not recommend content that contains negative stereotypes about a person or group with a protected attribute.” But incidents like this seem to consistently arise (and with little accountability). Neither Google nor TikTok responded to requests from The Verge for comment.

X bans hashtags in promoted posts.

In what Social Media Today is calling an “unnecessary move”, Elon Musk has announced X will ban hashtags from ads in order to improve the look of X’s promoted posts. “Starting tomorrow, the aesthetic nightmare that is hashtags will be banned from ads on X” Musk posted on the platform last week.

But many users took the opportunity to name other things that perhaps deserve his attention. Namely, the bots that seem to plague the platform. “The nightmare are the reply bots and scammers under tweets that make any serious discussion impossible nowadays and not some hashtags,” one user wrote. “What about bots? Isn't that a bigger aesthetic nightmare?” another chimed in. One user said they would “never understand” Musk's “ridiculous hate for hashtags.” It appears the anti-hashtag effort is driven more by Elon's personal preference than by actual utility. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

DEEP DIVE

Brand or performance? On TikTok, it’s both.

There’s a tired argument we all keep rehashing: “Should we invest in brand or performance?”

But Tracksuit just released new data that shuts that down completely. Spoiler: as brand awareness goes up, performance gets better. Not theoretically. Not eventually. Quantifiably.

In fact, the data shows that brand and performance aren’t competitors. On TikTok, they’re power couples. When you build brand, your performance marketing doesn’t just ride the wave… it gets significantly more efficient.

Awareness powers conversion.

According to the Awareness Advantage Report, when prompted brand awareness increases, so does performance efficiency. Dramatically.

For example:

• A brand with 40% prompted awareness is 43% more efficient at driving conversions than one with 30%.

• At 50% awareness, efficiency jumps another 29%.

• And the pattern keeps going.

That means every percentage point of awareness is making your performance dollars work harder.

This is about math. The data shows a direct, measurable link between how well-known your brand is and how efficiently you can turn interest into action.

Why does this happen? Well, it makes intuitive sense.

• When people know you, they scroll slower.

• When your brand feels familiar, your product feels like a safer bet.

• When they’ve seen your name before, they click with less hesitation.

Brand build trust, memory, and meaning—the very things performance marketing needs to close the loop.

For a long time, marketing has pitted brand and performance like a budget tug-of-war. But Tracksuits research proves they’re symbiotic. Brand building sets the stage. And performance converts the applause to revenue.

Ignore one, and the other underperforms. Invest in both, and they amplify each other.

This is more than just a TikTok thing. It’s a marketing truth. But on TikTok, where culture and commerce blur beautifully, it becomes especially obvious.

So, what does this mean?

Well next time someone says: “Brand campaigns are nice, but what’s the ROI?”, you can say: “The ROI is lower CPA, higher conversion, and better efficiency across the funnel. Here’s the link.” (And yes, hand them this report.)

It’s time to stop asking “brand vs. performance?”. The real question is, are we connecting the dots between them? Because on TikTok, when brand awareness rises, so do results.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

TREND PLUG

Nice fairy princess costume

Ever been complimented on something you actually can't take credit for?

Then there's this embarrassing moment where you have to decide whether to go along with what they've said (or come clean). Well, today's trend centres around those awkward situations. The sound comes from a Phineas and Ferb clip, which goes:

"Nice fairy princess costume"
"Actually, I'm not wearing a costume"
"Oh. Ok."
[pause] "I got it at the Googolplex Mall."

And creators are using this sound to describe times where they're tempted to tell a little white lie after someone has made an assumption about things like how many followers they actually have (it's not 2.3M followers—they just got 2.3M likes on a comment) or why they're able to read so many books (it's not that they're a fast reader—they just have no life).

How you can jump on this trend:

Decide what scenario you want to describe using the sound. Film yourself lip-syncing the lines "Actually I'm not wearing a costume" and "I got it at the Googolplex Mall." Use OST to describe the thing other people compliment you on and what you're tempted to tell them about it. Then, as you say the last line, use OST to come clean with the real story.

A few ideas to get you started:

• Who did your logo? Our graphic designer. (Oh ok.) I made it on Canva.

• Where was your first job? Saatchi and Saatchi. (Oh ok.) McDonald's drive through.

• How long did you spend on that pitch? An hour. (Oh ok.) 3 days and I only finished it at 2am.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

FOR THE GROUP CHAT

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TODAY ON THE YAP PODCAST

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ASK THE EDITOR

How can I make content for a retirement village that shows people that it's a fun place to live? -Briea

Hey Briea,

First of all, I wouldn't try to convince people that retirement villages are "fun." That's not really a human truth people relate to, because most people don't aspire to ever live in one. So instead, I would focus your content on deeper human truths that connect with what we all hope to have in our later years—things like community, connection, and feeling like a valued part of society.

This could look like telling the stories of the actual people living in your retirement village. That kind of content will give your audience something they can connect with instead.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

Not going viral yet?

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.

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