Benefits include clinical-sounding promises, marketing jargon, and premium gift wrapping. It can be yours today for just $269.99 (free shipping!!! although btw it’s just a fancy-sounding red apple). Or maybe a $195.50 Exotic Thirst-defying Hydrating Vessel (aka a coconut) is more your speed. Both “luxury products” are part of skincare brand The Ordinary’s latest anti-marketing campaign, which points out the ridiculous prices many skincare brands command, thanks to fancy-sounding benefits and pretty packaging. And honestly, it’s kinda genius. [Read more]

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

No no, I don’t mean “strict” or “gentle” or idk “deadbeat.” I mean on The Internet. Because apparently, motherhood is just another thing we’re branding these days. And deciding how you portray yourself online as a parent has become super important for some. Almost as important as, you know, doing the parenting part. Irl.

From the “butter moms” who reject modern diet culture and curate a vibrant 90’s style life with analog toys and primary colours, to “cozy moms” who co-ordinate sweaters with their babies and send their kids to Montessori. Some argue that these archetypes are beneficial for new moms in a time when it’s easy to lose yourself and identity to the all-consuming role of parenting a newborn. Others say it’s just another thing to brand and therefore throw into the capitalist cycle. Nothing we haven’t seen before, I guess.

Something we actually haven’t seen before and genuinely didn’t think we would, however, is the Amish falling in love with AI. “Oh, no cars or television for me please. But I absolutely will indulge in one of the newest and most harmful technologies in the world right now.” I beg your finest pardon?

There are around 2,600 Amish churches across the US. And each makes its own, separate decisions about what sorts of new tech church members can use. And many, according to the Intellegencer, are using AI for all sorts of reasons, whether it be exposure through their manufacturing jobs, or calling 1-800-ChatGPT (I had no idea this was even a thing.) If it’s even got the Amish hooked, we’re so screwed.

However, since most Amish have no smartphone, there’s less risk of falling into a chat rabbit hole. “I can’t lay in bed for half an hour asking Chat stuff. So the times when I’m vulnerable it’s not at my fingertips,” one interviewee says. “When I go home, I’m riding a horse or feeding chickens.” Well thank heavens for that!

Lastly, an update on this social media x school suit accord. The world's biggest platforms have agreed to pay a whopping $27 million to settle the lawsuit filed by a rural Kentucky school district claiming their addictive products drained school resources.

Meta is paying $9m, which is more than any other of the companies. Snapchat and TikTok will each pay $8m. YouTube negotiated a payout of slightly more than $2 million, and was the only company that also agreed to provide the district with training programs to help teachers better use its video product in classrooms. These all add up to be 8% more than Breathitt County School District’s $25 million annual budget. Cha-ching. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The lighting is soft, the shelves are pristine, and the air smells like wealth you’ve never experienced and for a second, wonder if you ever will.

You pick up a sleek round item labelled "100% Natural Glow-Enhancing Vitality Orb."

Ok, well. I need glow. And vitality. And who doesn’t like orbs?? The price tag reads a cool £305.00. Yikes.

A sales associate unironically explains that it is formulated with "fast-absorbing actives to dynamically optimise your skin’s cellular vitality". And then you realise. It’s a fkn avocado.

Taking over six cultural hubs including Paris, Toronto, and Melbourne, the activation features a fake grocery store. Here, everyday household necessities are aggressively repackaged like luxury skincare.

Alongside the £305 avocado, they are unironically ‘selling’ £96 toilet paper rebranded as High-Retention Cleansing Cylinders and £175 bananas masquerading as All-Natural Magical Energy-Boosting Bars.

The brilliant absurdity of the stunt relies entirely on this linguistic bait-and-switch. They've wrapped a standard roll of toilet paper or a bunch of bananas in heavy, premium typography and clinical descriptions. And in doing so, they perfectly mirror the deceptive aesthetics of high-end department store counters.

The activation forces consumers to realise that the massive markups they willingly pay elsewhere aren't funding groundbreaking skincare biotechnology—they are simply funding the premium cardboard box it came in.

Mainstream skincare marketing relies heavily on gatekeeping.

Brands routinely invent fake scientific suffixes. They weaponise the word clean. And they introduce absurd buzzwords like “magnetic cellular infusers". All to mask the reality that a product is mostly water, glycerine, and a fraction of a percent of an active ingredient.

The Ordinary’s campaign lands a devastating blow. Because it drags this exact strategy out of the sleek department store and drops it into a supermarket aisle. When you see a banana priced at £175 because it contains "energy-boosting botanical actives," you laugh because the deception is obvious.

And that, my friends, is The Ordinary’s exact point. We willingly accept this exact same linguistic trickery every single day in the beauty aisle.

But The Ordinary has never climbed the ladder. Rather, they sawed the legs off everyone else's.

By building a fake luxury supermarket, they executed a textbook "repositioning of the competitor”. Except it was more like framing every luxury competitor as a predatory joke.

Positioning is entirely relative.

The next time a shopper stands in front of a luxury counter looking at a triple-digit eye cream, their brain won’t register "prestige"… it will register "avocado." Lmfao.

See what I mean when I say this is genius? The brand is effectively altering how we perceive products, including its own, in the beauty sector. They in turn have positioned themselves as the baseline for logic and honesty in a sea of hysteria. They are the only rational choice. Not the cheap alternative.

The ultimate contrast effect.

By assigning an astronomical price to a piece of fruit, they force a psychological pivot. A shopper leaves the pop-up, looks at a luxury brand's £150 serum, and immediately thinks: Is this just another avocado? Suddenly, The Ordinary's actual £6 Niacinamide serum looks like the ultimate act of rational consumerism.

Radical honesty as a competitive moat.

In an era of intense consumer scepticism and de-influencing, audiences are profoundly fatigued by miraculous marketing claims. By ruthlessly mocking the very industry they belong to, The Ordinary positions themselves as the only transparent adult in the room. Their tagline for the activation literally says it all: "Buy the ingredients, not the hype."

Immersive meta-marketing.

The brand went way deeper than witty billboards. They actually built physical infrastructure, designing custom packaging for produce, and even listing the fake “products” on The Ordinary Official Website with over-engineered product descriptions. The commitment to the bit is insane. And the level of dedication rewards their community with a massive, shareable inside joke.

When your entire industry relies on complexity, illusion, and inflated prestige, your greatest weapon is aggressive simplicity.

The Ordinary just reminded us that the most memorable way to capture consumer attention isn't to shout louder than your competitors. It’s to rip the veil off of everyone’s eyes so you don’t have to shout at all.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

Take a 2017 episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, for example. In "Kimmy Does a Puzzle!", legendary R&B singer Dionne Warwick (played by Maya Rudolph) goes on a bizarre tirade during a hurricane telethon:

"You know, some people say global warming is a hoax, perpestrated by the Chinese. But I say, 'Show …"

First off, love the portmanteau of perpetrated and orchestrated to make whatever the hell "perpestrated" is. Henceforth, it will be a permanent addition to my vocabulary.

But more to the point - this bonkers (yet logically sound...?) rant perfectly encapsulates what it's like to just wing it and somehow still make it over the finish line. It's inspired a TikTok trend where creators lip-sync with the audio as they fight to make their nonsense heard, like when writing an assignment AI can't replicate or talking to your dog who just likes hearing your voice.

Take this sound, turn the camera around and film yourself typing while lip-syncing to the audio (it's a longer script, so practice in advance!). Then, add onscreen text describing a time you blasted some words out that probably didn't make sense, but needed to be said nonetheless.

A few ideas to get you started:

-Devin Pike, Copywriter

😂Yap’s funniest home videos - Life's hard in Australia
❤How wholesome - "Tall & Short Duo"
😊Soooo satisfying - Dye in Water
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight - 7 High Protein Dinners

Hey Brandon!

The first thing to accept is that you’ll never capture all of who you are in your content (and that’s okay). You’re a person with many sides who shows up differently in different contexts, and you'll exhaust yourself if you try to capture everything. Instead, think about who you’re speaking to and how you want to connect with them. Then, choose the parts of your story that feel right to share with that in mind.

If your goal is to provide value and share your journey, don't overthink it. You can start by talking about what you’re learning right now. That could be insights from your work, studies, or everyday experiences. Share the ideas you’re exploring, what’s inspiring you, and your own takeaways. Authenticity isn’t about showing everything. You just need to show enough to build a genuine connection with the people you actually want to reach.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

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.