Your ATTN Please | Thursday, 14 August

August 14, 2025

Are you ready for a brutal truth?

Nothing you’ve ever made was 100% original (sorry). Every TikTok, every blog post, every piece of art, is made up of a combination of other people’s ideas. The good news? That’s actually not a bad thing. And once you realise everything is a remix, you can stop chasing “originality” and start going after what is actually important—making your work yours.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

Building your personal brand is the best way to future-proof your career (now more than ever).

The problem is, if you don’t know what to post (and where to post it!), you’ll probably try for a few weeks, see no results, and just give up.

That’s why we’re running our next workshop on exactly how you should build your personal brand in 2025.

What you’ll learn from our founder, Stanley Henry:

👉 How to get started (even if you’ve never created content before)
👉 Why EVERYONE should be building a personal brand (yes, even you)
 👉 How to create a content system (so posting doesn’t take over your life)
👉 What type of content you should create (so you can make the most impact)

This session is not about theory! You will walk away with all the tools you need to start building your personal brand right away.

Wednesday, 3 Sept | 8:30 – 10:00am NZT | $59

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MARKETING TODAY?

Reddit blocks archiving, GPT5 will get a personality transplant & US gov socials meme everything

Reddit will start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing its pages.

Lemme give y’all some context: The Wayback Machine is essentially the time machine for the internet. Accessible only at archive.org/web, it's a digital archive of the World Wide Web. In recent months, Reddit has caught AI companies scraping data from the internet archive's Wayback Machine. AND SO, Reddit has decided to block the internet archive from indexing its pages.

“Internet Archive provides a service to the open web, but we’ve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told The Verge. Lowkey petty. Highkey love it.

OpenAI says it will fix GPT-5's “personality.”

Sam Altman took to X after literally every ChatGPT user ever digitally booed the recent update to the chatbot. Apparently, he plans to make the model “feel warmer than the current personality but not as annoying (to most users) as GPT-4o.”

He added, “One learning for us from the past few days is we really just need to get to a world with more per-user customization of model personality.” We shall see I guess. But for now, can you give me my GPT4o back THE WAY IT WAS. We was homies </3 

Official US gov socials are turning into meme accounts (and not the good kind).

At this point, it’s like they’re all in the Oval Office, on a whiteboard, with a big brainstorm that reads “how to gradually make American politics worse than you could ever possibly imagine.” And then underneath that “propaganda strategy: turn everything into one big meme.” I bet you’ve heard the catchy “Jet2 Holiday” jingle played 1 million times on your timeline this last month. I bet you didn’t expect to see DHS post a video to its social accounts incorporating the tune alongside footage of ICE detainees in handcuffs boarding a deportation plane, captioned “When ICE books you a one-way Jet2 holiday to deportation. Nothing beats it!”

Oh brother.

What kind of backwards hell do we have to be in for OFFICIAL government social media accounts like that of the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the White House resemble mere parodies of themselves? INTENTIONALLY, mind you. The posts range from normalising mass deportation, Christian nationalist narratives, and cruel, callous jokes recycled from the chronically online far-right. Let me off this ride.

Hey, do you like YAP?

If so, why not share it with a friend? The more we grow this thing, the more resources we can put into making it awesome for you. Even if every subscriber invites just 1 person to YAP, we’ll meet our growth goal for 2025. So, you in?

DEEP DIVE

Why chasing "originality" is a lie

There’s a dirty little secret no one tells you when you start making things for a living:

You will never make anything truly original. Ever.

I know. Fkn brutal. (and great for imposter syndrome, you’re welcome.)

Almost every song you love, every movie that wrecked you, every article that made you feel seen: all of it is kind of stitched together from what came before. Like an emotionally resonant Frankenstein. Maybe not as green or ugly. 

This isn’t a flaw. It’s simply just the nature of things.

As Kirby Ferguson’s documentary Everything Is a Remix puts it, all creative work builds on something else.

The act of “creating” is just… borrowing with style. I guess?

In music, this is obvious. Sampling. Covers. Interpolations. In fashion, it’s freaking blatant. Entire cycles are just trends on a 20-year delay. Even in tech, “new” products are culminations of existing tools (looking at you, every AI startup ever).

And in marketing, it’s the oxygen we breathe. The scroll is just the same ideas, re-dressed. One meme template in 400 brand voices. One TikTok trend re-shot until the pixels give out. “Repurposing content” is literally the business model.

Which brings me to the question I keep tripping over: When I sit down to write an article, how much of what I’m saying is mine? Is my opinion really my own, or just a mash-up of everything I’ve read, liked, bookmarked, and quietly absorbed from the digital ether?

In the old world, this might have been called plagiarism. In the new world, it’s called being “part of the conversation.” But where is the line?

Here’s the paradox. In art, remixing is celebrated. We praise Quentin Tarantino for stealing from ’70s exploitation films, Beyoncé for sampling Donna Summer, TikTok creators for “adding their own twist.” But in writing or thought leadership? We get precious about originality. As if having a totally pure, uninfluenced idea is even possible in 2025, when we’re all mentally marinating in the same internet soup.

It genuinely eats me up sometimes. Particularly when we need to produce so much, so often, tossing between the most insane creative blocks, struggling to make anything, and feeling “too influenced” by what everyone else is saying to the point where I wonder: am I allowed to make/ say/ write this?

Aaand this the part where imposter syndrome starts gnawing at the edges. 

When every idea feels like it’s been done, the brain starts whispering: Maybe you’re not creative at all. Maybe you’re just recycling smarter people’s work. You overthink, over-research, over-polish. You convince yourself that if you can’t be the first, you shouldn’t even bother being the next. And that spiral is a huge creativity killer. It pushes you into safe, forgettable work that feels “correct” but never hits.

But the crazy thing is, nobody in history has made anything in a vacuum. The best ideas are a culmination of influence, reference, and personal filter. The goal isn’t to erase what inspired you. It’s to own how you’ve transformed it.

The truth I’ve come to realise is that the value isn’t in being first. It’s in being useful.

In taking an existing thread and weaving it into something sharper, funnier, more relevant for your audience right now. Nobody cares that you weren’t the first person to talk about something. They care that you made it click for them, today, in their feed, in a way that felt human and worth reading.

Which is why, if you work in marketing, and you’re anything like me (overthinker, duh) this mindset shift is everything. Instead of agonising over “is this my idea?” ask:

  • Did I add something new? A fresh example, a different angle, a sharper frame.

  • Did I make it work here? For this platform, this audience, this moment.

  • Did I make it mine? My tone, my humour, my worldview baked in.

Originality in the digital age is not about being untouched by influence. It’s about having taste (as I’ve mentioned). Knowing what to keep, what to cut, and how to combine ideas so they actually land.

Everything is a remix. The question isn’t whether you’re borrowing (it’s a little too late for that). Instead, it’s whether you’re making something worth borrowing from.

And above all else, making it yours.

It’s the way you combine, twist, and filter influences through you. Your lived experiences, your taste, your specific way of noticing things. That’s the real differentiator. That’s the important stuff.

Your version should feel unmistakeably yours. A little weirder, sharper, funnier, kinder – whatever feels true to you. Something your friends could read and say: only they could’ve written this.

The internet doesn’t need you to invent fire. It needs you to take the existing spark and set your corner of the world alight. That’s the real mark you leave in a saturated world. 

TREND PLUG

B*tch, please

This trend comes from a confessional scene in Baddies, where someone off-camera asks Natalie Nunn to introduce herself.

She immediately cuts them off with, “B*tch please, y’all know who the f*ck I am,” and the line has been living rent-free in TikTok audio ever since. Now, people are using it to flex a fun fact about themselves, especially in situations where you’d normally have to do a boring intro.

Creators set up the sound so it looks like someone has just asked them to introduce themselves. The more niche, petty, or oddly specific the flex, the better. My fav examples include: 

How you can jump on this trend: 

Film yourself to the sound, reacting as if you’ve been asked to introduce yourself. Then, pair it with your best “obviously I’m a big deal” moment. Bonus points for adding a visual receipt, like a screenshot, stat, or old photo, to walk the talk.

A few ideas to get you started:

  • When they tell me to introduce myself but I got 500k views on a post about coffee cups

  • When someone says “and you are?” but I’m the reason the brand even has a TikTok presence

  • When someone asks my job title but I’m the one who made the client cry (in a good way) during the presentation

- abdel khalil, brand & marketing executive

FOR THE GROUP CHAT

😲WTF: This would be illegal today
❤How wholesome: What a lovely little lad
😊Soooo satisfying: Laundry restocks
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Lasagna Style Baked Burritos

ASK THE EDITOR

I know I should be posting content about my new brand but I can never bring myself to post. What should I do? - Wynn

Hey Wynn!

This is such a common thing that holds so many people back from posting content. It’s helpful to remember that no one is thinking about you the way you’re thinking about you. Everyone is paying more attention to themselves. Or as we talk about in our team, there's not a stadium of people waiting for you to put content out.

Once you realise no one cares that much, it's liberating. You can be ok posting content that's good enough. Because you can't improve on something that doesn't exist yet. I hate to say it, but you just have to get over yourself and do it scared. It will get easier once you just start.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

PSST…PASS IT ON

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