Your ATTN Please | Monday, 4 August

I’m going to hold your hand while I say this but: stop throwing money at Meta without thinking.

Look, I get it. There’s something deeply seductive about paid ads. You write a few lines of copy, add a chic picture of a person smiling in a blazer, throw $500 behind it and wait for the conversions to roll in. It’s performance marketing, baby! The promise is in the name: performance. The problem? As much as we wished it was that simple, there’s something you have to get right if you don’t want to waste all that spend.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

Wanna hang out IRL?

You're invited to Lectures After Dark, hosted by The Attention Seeker team. This event's all about getting a bunch of marketers in a room, listening to a thought-provoking talk, and having a casual chat with some cool people. If you're in Auckland, we'd love to see you there on 14 August. $20pp

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MARKETING TODAY?

Chipotle X Wonderskin collab, Walton Goggins gets spicy in Doritos ad & TikTok goes OOH

Chipotle x Wonderskin Lip Stain: so nice, they did it twice.

Why would you not, when last year the collab between the two brands sold out in a week and drew more than 10,000 emails, posts, and comments asking for more? Now, a year later, they’ve gone and done it again, three-fold. Answering the call for more, the brand has put out 30,000 products, which once more, sold out in a week. The relaunch generated more than 41 million social impressions, 282,000 earned social engagements, and 3 billion earned media impressions. This goes to show the power of unexpected collabs, if you can resonate with the right niche.

In this case, that niche is people eating Chipotle who don’t want to ruin their lipstick, an idea that came from the rising popularity of mukbangs featuring their products. “Having content in the beauty category versus content in mukbangs, that’s where you double your reach and have even more success when two brands come together,” Stephanie Perdue, VP of brand marketing at Chipotle told Marketing Brew. Genius.

Walton Goggins goes spicy, but not too spicy, in new Doritos ad.

Yes, that’s  a wrench in his pocket, and yes, he’s happy to see you. If you’re a bag of Golden Sriracha Doritos, that is. The ad, which is literally the closest thing you can get to a 70s p*rn film – minus the nudity – has everything you could expect in terms of stereotypes of the genre.

You've got The Plumber (Goggins), The Bombshell and The Cougar, all fitted with sweaty, skin-tight clothing, horny stares, and double entendres. Risque? Majorly. Hilarious and bold? Absolutely.

TikTok turns OOH to OOP (Out of Phone).

The platform announced an expansion of its off-platform advertising program, which will apparently extends TikTok content across billboards, in-store displays, cinema promos and other OOH screens. So if you’ve gotten his far without downloading the app, you’re sh*t out of luck in avoiding it now.

The expansion will also see content coming to shopping malls, taxis, and water refilling stations. Just to make sure you really get the feeling of inescapabilty. Yay! 😊 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

DEEP DIVE

Why the key to better ad performance is asking, "Would my sister give a sh*t?"

There’s an inconvenient truth about Meta ads you might not want to hear:

No amount of ad spend will fix a weak offer. You can’t scale what’s broken. If people aren’t biting, it’s likely not because you forgot to use the word “limited.” It’s because your offer needs work, babes.

So, before you boost, promote, optimise, A/B test, or pour your entire freaking Q3 budget into Instagram Reels, take a step BACK. Put the keyboard DOWN, and ask yourself: is my offer actually any good?

Because the fact of the matter is, your ads are only as good as what you’re selling.

Performance campaigns are designed to drive action: clicks, purchases, sign-ups, downloads. But people don’t take action just because you batted your lashes and asked nicely (although in some cases this does work, imo.)

But no, they take action because they understand what you’re offering. They want it, and believe it's worth the trade: time, money, email address, soul, etc.

If your ad isn’t converting, it might not be the targeting. It might be the value proposition. Think of your offer as the core promise you’re making to your audience. If that promise is fuzzy, boring, confusing, or way too inside-baseball, even the best ad won’t save you.

You’re not selling your thing. You’re selling what your thing does for people. And yes, there is a huge difference.

This is why my CD always asks this when making ad creative, "Would my sister give a sh*t?"

And he’s on the money there. One of the easiest ways to spot a weak offer is to remove yourself from it. You, the founder/marketer/agency, are too close. You’ve spent weeks (months? years?) in the Google Doc trenches. You know all the features, benefits, acronyms, and use cases. But that doesn’t mean anyone else does…or should.

Ask yourself:

• Would my aunt care?

• Would my sister get what this is?

• Would a complete stranger stop scrolling for this?

If you have to explain it in five follow-up sentences, it's not clear enough. If you have to say “it's kind of like X, but not really,” it's not compelling enough. If you start talking about “robust integrations,” I’m already asleep. Zzzzzz.

So, how do you know your if offer needs a bit of a glow up?

Let’s do a little self-audit. Your offer might be the problem if:

• You’re getting clicks but no conversions

• You keep dropping price to compensate

• You’re attracting the wrong audience entirely

• Your most engaged comment is “what is this?”

• Your best pitch lives in a 35-slide deck no one reads

This is not a campaign problem. This is a clarity problem.

Now, how do we optimise that?

1. Make it stupid clear: Say what it is, who it's for, and why they should care. In plain language. No buzzwords, no jargon, no freaking "solutioning."

2. Show the transformation: People don’t want your product. They want the after photo. So spell it out. What changes after they buy, click, sign up?

3. Find the friction: What’s stopping someone from saying yes? Price? Trust? Confusion? Laziness? Answer those objections upfront.

4. Add urgency that’s actually believable: Scarcity and time-limits still work, but not if they feel fake. “Only 2 spots left!” when you just launched? Girl, please.

5. Pressure test with real humans: Send your pitch to someone NOT IN THE INDUSTRY. If they get it immediately and show interest, you’re on the right track. If they say “sounds cool!” and never follow up, back to the drawing board.

6. Highlight the trade off: Frame it in terms of what they’ll lose if they don’t take action. FOMO isn’t manipulative, it’s motivational.

A better offer makes your ad dollar work harder.

When your offer is strong, your cost-per-click goes down. Your conversion rates go up. Your comments become “omg I need this” instead of “wtf is this.” Paid ads amplify what’s already there. So, make sure what’s there is worth shouting about.

And remember, performance marketing doesn’t start when the campaign launches. It starts the moment someone reads your headline and thinks, “Wait. I actually want that.”

Clarity, not budget, is your best performance lever.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

TREND PLUG

You’re an extremely odd individual

Love Island is the gift that keeps on giving.

This time, it’s Amaya delivering a line so cold, so cutting, it instantly became TikTok lingo:

“You’re an extremely odd individual. And I do not want to f*cking talk to you ever again.”

TikTok has since claimed the sound for every time someone does something just slightly too weird to ignore. Whether it's a red flag, a niche ick, or just ✨odd vibes✨, this is now the official way to call it out. Creators are using this trend to call out people who've rubbed them the wrong way. Some standout examples:

• “People who have no empathy towards animals”

• “Me to my boyfriend after he successfully rage baits me”

• “When people my age still have their auto caps off” (ouch)

How you can jump on this trend: 

Use the sound over a calm but deeply judgmental-looking shot of yourself. Then throw text on screen calling out the oddly specific behaviour that made you rethink everything.

A few ideas to get you started:

• People who say "let’s circle back" and never do

• People who say "Canva is basically the same as InDesign"

• Anyone who schedules a brainstorm at 4:30 on a Friday

- abdel khalil, brand & marketing executive

FOR THE GROUP CHAT

😂Yap’s funniest home videos: Driving like it’s GTA
❤How wholesome: me and bestie in another life
😊Soooo satisfying: AI Cutting ASMR
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Caramelised Onion Pasta

ASK THE EDITOR

I'm getting disheartened because my posts have totally flopped recently. How do I keep being consistent when I'm not getting anywhere? -Dan

Hey Dan!

Totally get where you're coming from. It can be hard to keep posting when you aren't getting much engagement. But the only way to improve your content is to (you guessed it) keep posting.

I'd encourage you to keep posting every day, paying attention to your analytics. Experiment by changing up your hook, images, and post style. Don’t be afraid to change up your format and see how it lands with your audience. The bottom line is, you'll figure out what works way faster by continuing to post than stopping!

- 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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