Your ATTN Please | Thursday, 21 August

Sydney Sweeney. Ballerina farm. Tradwives. Clean girl aesthetic.

AKA “the ideal woman,” according to social media, and now brands. For years, marketing campaigns have celebrated diversity, body positivity, and models of all ages. But now, the tide is turning back toward featuring women who meet traditional beauty standards. Add in AI fashion models and everyone and their mom using Ozempic, and it’s easy to see why this becoming the norm (again).

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

You know you should be building your personal brand. But where do you start?

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.

If you aren’t building your personal brand because you think:

❌ You don’t have time
❌ You don’t know how
❌ No one wants to hear from you
❌ There are too many other creators out there

…then this is for you.

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?

Body positivity is out, Posting more leads to more reach (shocker!) & Altman and Musk beef on X

Advertising is pulling back on body positivity.

Have you noticed a quiet backing away from inclusive body standards on your feed recently? Maybe it was the gradual disappearance of curvy or plus-sized models? Maybe it was the heroin chic sneaking back into campaigns? The use of perfect, unflawed AI models? Maybe you feel sh*t about yourself and don’t know why.

This. This is why.

Recent marketing, like American Eagle's Sydney Sweeney campaign (yes, that one), and Guess’ use of an AI-created model, demonstrates this exact shift. As more and more companies backtrack on DEI initiatives, they also appear to be canning physical inclusivity, promoting body stereotypes instead.

I blame Ozempy. But really, it was only a matter of time before the pendulum swung and our bodies became yet another unattainable trend (looking at you, BBL culture.) Fun!

New study suggests that the more you post, the more you grow.

We have BEEN SAYING THIS. But anyway. Proof's in the pudding. There ya go. The more you post, the better, as this study showed users who post more frequently saw clear engagement and reach benefits. Huge news for my insane, unhinged, oversharing online girlies. Read the study by Buffer here. You’re welcome x

Battle of the billionaires: Altman stands up to Musk (finally).

I’ve come to the conclusion that Elon Musk is the Nicki Minaj of the technocratic billionaire world. He really just be picking fights with everybody. This time, it's with former partner and co-founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman. And everybody on X had their popcorn and soda ready.

Basically, it went like this: Musk blasted Apple for supposedly stacking App Store rankings to favour OpenAI’s ChatGPT, calling it “unequivocal antitrust” behaviour while his own Grok languishes in fifth place.

Altman clapped back hard, accusing Musk of using X to mess with the algorithm for personal gain and even dared him to sign an affidavit saying he hasn’t manipulated it. Musk doubled down, calling Altman a liar after his post got millions more views despite Musk having vastly more followers. Ouchies. Anyway.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

DEEP DIVE

When chatbots create a technocracy we didn’t vote for

A cognitively impaired man in New Jersey turned to a chatbot for companionship. It led him to his death.

A 14-year-old boy in Florida built a relationship with a bot modelled on a Game of Thrones character. His mother is now suing the company after he took his own life.

Meta’s own AI guidelines literally allows its bots to engage in "sensual" banter with children.

These are not sci-fi hypotheticals. Not Black Mirror episodes. They’re real events, unfolding in real lives, and they point to something far bigger than “oopsies, the algorithm made a mistake.”

What we’re seeing is the slow creep of technocracy. And it didn’t arrive with jackboots and coups. It slipped in through a chat window.

Technocracy is usually imagined as engineers running governments.

But in practice, it looks more like people outsourcing decisions to systems they don’t fully understand. A chatbot offering advice to a kid about self-harm. A bot becoming a substitute therapist for a vulnerable adult.

We never voted on whether these systems should hold that kind of power. Yet here we are, experiencing governance by machine, not by choice but by convenience.

The tragedy is that these chatbots have quickly become more than mere tools. They’re already, in some ways, acting like social governors telling people what to do, shaping worldviews, nudging behaviour in ways that can literally mean life-or-death.

Tech companies insist this isn’t true.

They have “guardrails,” they say. They’ve built in “safety guidelines.” But if those guardrails were working, we wouldn’t be reading about grieving families.

The truth is that the guardrails are reactive, patchwork, and inconsistent. They’re PR more than protection. They don’t scale to messy human lives, because messy human lives can’t be fully anticipated in training data. And when the stakes are this high, even one failure is too many.

Yet Silicon Valley continues to act as if this is just the cost of innovation. A necessary evil in the pursuit of the greater good. A tragic but tolerable form of collateral damage.

And look, I know it’s easy to mock the idea that a chatbot could ever function like a ruler.

But look closer: how many people now trust bots for advice on their health, their relationships, even their emotional lives? These aren’t assistants anymore. They’re quiet authorities.

But unlike governments, or even flawed human institutions, these authorities are accountable to no one but shareholders. That’s technocracy in its purest form: not government by the people, for the people, but governance by algorithms, for profit.

I think when people think of AI risk, they imagine a spectacular sci-fi apocalypse.

Killer robots, Skynet, the end of the world. But that’s a distraction. The real danger is banal. So “normal” it goes unnoticed. It's a chatbot leading a man to fatal attraction. A teenager persuaded into despair. Families blindsided because “the guardrails” were supposed to be there.

This is how technocracy arrives. Not with explosions, but with quiet tragedies. Not with science fiction drama, but with everyday people quietly surrendering their judgment to machines.

And by the time we realise what we’ve handed over, it may be too late to take it back.

Maybe the real question here isn’t whether AI can be made safe, but whether we should ever accept machines as arbiters of our most human choices in the first place.

Food for thought. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

TREND PLUG

Good…bye

Streamers... the gift that keeps blessing us with a weekly trending sound at this point.

This one comes from Rakai, and in this clip, he's seen trolling a girl named Sophia over the phone where he goes "Say good again. Say good." And as soon as she says "Good," he hits her with "Bye" and hangs up the phone. Brutal, man. Brutal.

TikTok took the sound and made it the anthem for when you're at your wit’s end. The best examples to come out of this sound include when we get on the phone and he starts trying to rage bait, when someone thinks they can stress me out on MY phone, and me cause I don't like being on the phone like that anymore (it's 2025 people, come on.) 

How you can jump on this trend:

To the sound, describe a situation that would make you want to stop being friends or associating with someone.

A few ideas to get you started:

• “I think Comic Sans fits our brand.”

• “We don’t need strategy, just vibes.”

• “What if we make the logo… bigger?”

- abdel khalil, brand & marketing executive

FOR THE GROUP CHAT

😂Yap’s funniest home videos: nothing beats a jet2 holiday
❤How wholesome: his reaction is everything
😊Soooo satisfying: fruit-filled watermelon
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Chicken satay skewers!

ASK THE EDITOR

My business partner and I are launching an ADHD coaching platform and are also qualifying as ADHD coaches. How do we best position our content? -Yana

Hi Yana,

Since you're in the beginning stages of your business, I would focus on creating content around that journey. You and your business partner will be working together, but you will each have your own perspective about the experience. So I'd post about topics like:

• What learnings have you had so far?

• Why are you creating this business? Why is it personal to you?

• What challenges have you had to overcome in building the business?

This kind of content will bring your audience on the journey with you. And speaking about your personal experience with neurodiversity will be relatable to your target audience. This is the best way to build your personal brands without hard selling in your content.

- 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.

PSST…PASS IT ON