Your ATTN Please || Thursday, 12 June

Your brand is the chatbot that gaslights your customers.

It’s the sign-up flow that’s less personal than a Happy Birthday email from your dentist. Forget that tone of voice doc you made 6 years ago. Branding now lives at every touchpoint—those micro-moments where you either build trust or make people want to chuck their laptop out the window. Your CX is your brand, which means it’s prettyyy important to get it right.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

**Y’all this is tomorrow & we’re nearly sold out**

Join our team for a 90-minute workshop to find out the exact strategies we've used to grow our Instagram following to 600k+. This workshop is not about theory. It's about giving you actionable takeaways you can implement straight away.

Learn what's working on the platform right now from:

• Jony Lee, our expert short-form strategist

• Stanley Henry, founder at The Attention Seeker 

Bring your questions and we will bring everything we've learnt spending thousands of hours on Instagram. We're not gatekeeping anything, so get ready!

Friday 13 June | 8:30–10:00am NZT | $49

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MARKETING TODAY?

Reddit lets you hide your past, X tells you what posts you won’t like & Meta violates your privacy

Reddit will now let you hide NSFW activity from your profile.

Oooo, naughty! For the first time in the history of the platform, Reddit will allow users to curate their public-facing profiles by hiding some of their posting and commenting activity from other users. And I can already tell this is going to divide the internet.

In the past, being able to check out other users' post history and community activities meant that, while anonymous, Redditors were still able to weed out trolling, lying, or bad behaviour on the platform. This ability was seen as a key part of the platform's “openness.” But at the same time, if you don’t want people seeing what you get up to in the NSFW section, I kind of get it.

X is now testing a feature that labels posts you may not agree with.

I’m sure this won’t be messy at all lol. The new tool is intended to highlight content that has contentious opinions. Initially, it will be rolled out to a few thousand regular contributors to Community Notes, X’s crowdsourced fact-checking feature.

According to AdWeek, “The new feature will display a callout box showing when a post has been widely liked by users with differing opinions—based on historical data about their Community Notes contributions. The callout could appear on both high- or low-visibility posts, including branded content and ads.”

Users included in the testing pilot will see these callout boxes and then have the ability to add their opinions and rate others' feedback. X will eventually use this data to build an open-sourced algorithm that shows when a post is liked by users who hold different perspectives. The plan is to expand this into a much larger feature soon. Very interested to see how this goes!

Meta is violating your privacy (but you can do something about it).

Researchers recently caught Meta siphoning people’s data through a digital back door of Facebook and Instagram for months. Shock. This doesn't come as much of a surprise. But the Washington Post reported that “the tactics the researchers identified were so scuzzy they surprised even those digital privacy experts who have seen every trick in the book.” The publisher called the move a “gross violation of people’s basic expectations.” 2025 stooping to new lows? Coolcoolcool.

Here are some things you can do to reduce risk:

• Use an alternate browser that isn’t Chrome

• For Android, change your phone settings to make one of those more privacy-preserving browsers the default anytime you click a web link

• For iPhone, use Safari, which has strong privacy protections

• Use a company’s website rather than its app

• Delete Meta and Yandex apps on your phone

Read the full down low here.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

DEEP DIVE

Why your CX team is your brand team

Remember when branding was just your logo, your voice, and your tone guidelines PDF that no one read?

Yeah. That era’s over. Today your brand is the product and vice versa. Not just the ads or the aesthetic. The experience. And the way people experience your brand can literally dictate your survival.

No one cares about your values if your onboarding flow makes them want to stab holes in their brain. And your gorgeous homepage sure as hell don’t mean sh*t if you chatbot is a sociopath.

That’s because modern branding lives in the margins.

The micro-copy in your sign-up flow. The “oops” message when someone hits a dead link. The moment your support team sends a DM saying “we fixed it.”

That’s branding. That’s the moment of trust. And those are the moments people truly remember. Not your brand campaign on socials from six months ago.

Your CX team is essentially your brand team now.

The fastest and easiest way to kill your brand promise is to break it in the customer journey. You can say you "empower creators" but if your dashboard is a UX labyrinth and your support team ghosts them like a Tinder hookup – congrats, you’ve just branded yourself a liar.

Marketing can’t sit in a silo anymore. The best brand builders are in product meetings, in customer service Slack channels, and in the weeds of real user pain points.

Brands that get this right win big.

Take Notion for example. Every part of their experience, from product onboarding to error messages, feels like Notion. Same with Monzo. And Airbnb. The marketing doesn’t end when the ad stops. It’s embedded in every interaction.

These brands didn’t “create a vibe.” They operationalised one.

Long story short:

• Every functional touchpoint is a brand moment.

• Brand isn’t just how you look or sound. It’s how you show up.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

TREND PLUG

Not just a badass

Today's audio mashup pairs two totally opposite vibes: “I feel so sigma…” (think stoic, unbothered, emotionally detached), immediately followed by a high-pitched “aww”.

The idea is to pair the sound with two visuals that are just as contrasting. The first shows someone’s “outward” (usually serious) persona. And the other gives insight into who (or what!) it takes to bring out their softer side. Creators are using this trend to show the people, animals, or moments that break through their tough exteriors and literally make them go “aww”.

How you can jump on this trend:

Start with a clip or photo of you that feels cool, distant, or all-business. Use the OST “I feel so sigma…” and then cut to yourself doing something softer – unexpectedly wholesome, emotional, relaxed or sincere. Put the “Awwwwww” OST here. Make sure to time it with the audio to give the best effect.

For brand accounts, think about showing the contrast between “boss” energy (yours or your product’s) and the fun, softer “behind the scenes” side.

A few ideas to get you started:

• Sigma → your sleek founder headshot in a blazer. Aww → the behind-the-scenes footage of your toddler helping you pack orders.

• Sigma → your polished, perfect Reels grid. Aww → your camera roll, which is 97% outtakes and bloopers featuring your dog.

• Sigma → your product in sleek flat lay photos. Aww → a customer review that says “my baby won’t sleep without it” and includes a blurry but adorable pic.

-Helena Masters, Copywriter

TODAY ON THE YAP PODCAST

Want even more “YAP”ing? Check out the full podcast here.

ASK THE EDITOR

I've just started a financial consulting business. How do I start building a network of potential clients on socials? -Aria

Hey Aria!

As you're a service-based business, my advice is to start with LinkedIn! The platform is a goldmine for connecting with potential clients. Create as much content as you can so you start showing up on people's feeds.

At the same time, begin building your network. Use the LinkedIn search bar to find people who would be an ideal client for you. Create a spreadsheet with information like their name, job title, company, and then link their profile. Once you've got this database, use it to find and interact with these people's posts on a regular basis.

Make sure your comments are thoughtful, not just "nice post" or something generic. Over time, they will begin noticing you, and hopefully interacting with your content, too. It will take a few months for you to grow a real presence on LinkedIn. But being super intentional about who you engage with will help you connect with the right people much faster.

- 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.

WHAT DO YA THINK?

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