Your ATTN Please | Saturday, 20 September

September 20, 2025

I know this isn’t a popular idea, but just hear me out: you need to be more boring.

Look, I get it. To be “successful” in digital marketing these days, your content apparently needs to be meme-heavy and unhinged. We’re not saying that stuff’s bad, but what’s underneath that? What actually draws people to your brand and keeps them coming back, regardless of viral trends that’ll be forgotten in a year’s time? The answer lies in being effectively, memorably - and ironically - boring.

- Devin Pike, Guest Editor 💜

PRESENTED BY THE ATTENTION SEEKER

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✅ A full content strategy
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We recently helped Tough Yarns with their social strategy. Three months later? They’ve got 77K+ followers across IG & TikTok.

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WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MARKETING TODAY?

Meta cleans up the Metaverse, Pinterest is pro-curation & Animal Crossing goes French Revolution

Meta is finally making the Metaverse look better.

If I’m honest, I forgot this thing even existed. Surely it must be a ghost town at this point? Now Meta is giving some major upgrades to its Roblox-like social platform Horizon Worlds, including a new game engine, better graphics, as well as the Meta Horizon Studio, which allows users to make custom in-game experiences.

Horizon Worlds hasn’t “caught on” broadly, as The Verge put it (shocker). but Meta is pushing for more creators to get on board, even opening up a $50 million creators fund earlier this year.

Almighty Pinterest publishes report: curation is key to driving purchase activity.

Because everybody has decision paralysis, because there’s too much shit to choose from. Literally up to our EYEBALLS with options, and this leads to cart abandonment. So, to reduce consumer stress and maximize listings, Pinterest says brands need to curate. It’s literally that simple: display items in relevant context, don’t make it all convoluted and complicated like most brands do.

“Curation helps people to narrow their choices and discover the trends or patterns that feel just right for them. At this point of the process, shoppers begin to connect the dots and see how the product fits in their lives. 75% of shoppers say that having the ability to refine their options leads to more confident decisions.”

Now say thank you to the all-seeing Pinterest gods x

AI breathed new life into 'Animal Crossing' and made the villagers rise up against their landlord. Hell yeah.

Turning Animal Crossing into a class war? Not on my 2025 bingo card. But seeing as everyone is fighting IRL we may as well take it virtual too. Some tech wizard in Austin rigged up Animal Crossing with an LLM and suddenly the villagers are exposing Tom Nook’s (the raccoon who runs the town) hustle.

Josh Fonseca, a programmer, hooked the game to AI and even added a news RSS feed so these cute animals started yakking about real world politics, current events and yes, complaining about being trapped in debt to their landlord (that’d be Nook). Using fine-tuned Gemini and some memory tricks, the mod made Cookie, Scoot, Cheri & co gossip, revolt, accuse Tom Nook of taking “all the bells”, and dream of taking back the town. It’s silly, surreal and tbh kind of spectacular.

Power to the fuzzy folk. 

DEEP DIVE

The case for marketing boredom

Marketers (and consumers tbh) are like fiends these days: absolutely addicted to chaos.

If it isn’t AI-generated Drake jingles, deep fried schizo memes, or some fast food mascot twerking on TikTok, we’re told it’s not “innovative". The mantra is always: disrupt, reinvent, grab attention at any cost. But here’s a hot take (and by now you know I’m full of those): maybe the most radical move a brand can make in 2025 is… being boring.

Not boring in the sense of lifeless - Because why tf would I tell you to do that? I mean boring as in consistent. Predictable. Steady. The kind of marketing that won’t land you on the front page of AdAge, but will quietly keep the money flowing, year over year type beat.

As humans, we secretly love boring brands.

We are wired for predictability. We like routines, we like rituals, we like doing the same ab workout for the last five years (with no abs to show for it), we like knowing what we’re going to get. That’s why people order the same Starbucks drink every morning as a religious practice, or why Colgate has been in your bathroom cabinet since you were in diapers. Reliability feels safe.

Marketing chaos gives us novelty, but as we all know, novelty fades (where’s your Labubu currently, huh?) What people actually stick to are the brands that become habits, woven into the day-to-day without us even noticing. Spotify Wrapped, and yes I know I’ve used this example to death. Even though it might be the flashy campaign that trends every December, the real reason Spotify dominates is because it quietly owns your commute, your workout, your sad-girl-washing-dishes-staring-out-the-window playlist.

Cringe campaigns and viral stunts might grab your attention for a week, but they rarely build trust. Trust is slow, repetitive, and yes, boring. And trust is what actually makes people stick around. This is proven. This is the marketers north star.

And there are frameworks that prove that boring works, too.

Despite my usual approach to things, this isn’t just a vibes-based argument, there’s hard data backing it up.

  • The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has shown that the brands that grow aren’t the ones who shock and awe, but the ones that are mentally and physically available. In short: be easy to buy, be easy to remember, and be consistent.

  • Retention beats acquisition. Bain & Company found that increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25%-95%. Retention isn’t flashy, but it’s basically compound interest for your brand.

  • The supposedly “dead” channels still quietly outperform the shiny ones. Email is boring, yet it delivers an average $36 ROI per dollar spent. Paid search? Still the top driver of conversions for most businesses.

It’s not sexy. But it works.

Think of it like dating. Chaos marketing is the one-night stand: maybe thrilling and spontaneous, but sometimes (more often than not) regrettable. Boring marketing is the long-term partner who always shows up, remembers your coffee order, and does the grocery shopping with you. One gives you a short story; the other gives you a fulfilling and stable life.

We’ve seen what happens when brands go all-in on chaos. May I remind you of Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner protest ad? Viral for all the wrong reasons. Or the endless wave of fast food Twitter accounts trying to out-weird each other until the bit got so overdone and cringe that now it’s completely dead in the water. These moments generated headlines, but they didn’t build lasting loyalty.

Compare that to the brands who have mastered boring. Coca Cola has barely done anything innovative or memorable over the years, but it’s still breaking everywhere you look, eat, shop. Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign started in 2004 and still shapes their comms. It's boring, but steady and still here.

So then, how do you build a boring-but-powerful marketing engine?

And how do you embrace the power of boring without becoming forgettable? Think of it as building your marketing foundation:

  1. Set a cadence and stick to it. Don’t ghost your audience for weeks and then drop a chaotic rebrand. Show up on schedule, emails, posts, updates.

  2. Optimize the unglamorous channels. Search, email, loyalty programs, CRM systems. They don’t trend on LinkedIn, but they keep customers coming back.

  3. Measure retention, not just reach. Viral spikes look good in a deck, but recurring revenue looks good in a bank account. And only one is going to get you that new Prada bag.

  4. Layer chaos on top, not instead. Once the boring engine is humming, then you can add the experimental stunt, the risky TikTok, the weird mascot moment. Dessert, not the meal.

Is it time for a boring rebellion?

The point I’m trying to get to is that boring makes the fun possible. Without a reliable baseline, every creative risk becomes existential. With a boring backbone, you can experiment without fear.

In an industry that rewards chaos, maybe the bravest, most rebellious thing you can do is stick to a routine.

TREND PLUG

“The clue board? You mean my clue board?”

This one goes out to all my fellow early adopters out here, its not easy out here having the vision (Jorts wearers in 2018, WE were on the frontlines).

Coming straight out of the top 10 animated movies of all time (argue with the wall), Trolls has had a scene break into the TikTok fyp matrix.

Branch is upset that Poppy finally wants to use the clue board that HE made, that no one wanted to use initially. The line goes:

It's the perfect anthem for when you like something way before the masses catch on.

My fav examples of the trend include:

How you can jump on this trend:

To the sound, lip-sync the line above and talk about something people started liking all of a sudden that you've ALWAYS liked.

A few ideas to get you started:

  • When a client suddenly loves a strategy you pitched months ago and they rejected.

  • When the Slack channel you built for fun memes becomes “core culture.”

  • When a sound you’ve been using forever finally hits the FYP mainstream.

  • When a micro-trend you posted about two weeks ago ends up on every brand page.

- abdel khalil, brand & marketing executive

FOR THE GROUP CHAT

😂Yap’s funniest home videos: This was the tipping point
❤How wholesome: she came to see HER baby too
😊Soooo satisfying: Sliced Labubu NOOOO
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: One pan vegetarian taco skillet

ASK THE EDITOR

I've been promoting my new course for accountants on my socials but I'm not getting any sign-ups. What am I doing wrong? - Ervin

Hey Ervin!

If you aren't getting leads, you're likely coming across too salesy in your content. Organic content's for building a relationship with your audience, so if they feel like you're trying to sell them something, they'll tune you out.

If I were you, I'd pull back on promoting your course. Instead, create content around what the course is about. Be actually helpful, because this positions you as an expert. Then engage with your audience in the comments to keep building those relationships. Because those relationships are what will make people interested in buying from you.

You can still mention your course in your content, just don't do it in every post. Because if you're just selling in your content, no one will be interested in watching it!

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

PSST…PASS IT ON

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