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- Your ATTN Please | Thursday, 4 September
Your ATTN Please | Thursday, 4 September
Shhh…be quiet for a sec and just listen.
…do you hear it? If you sit in total silence you can hear the sound of…nothing. Yep, that’s what a cultural void sounds like. And it’s what we’re experiencing this summer (yes, even if you’re in the Southern Hemi). Last year, we were inundated with Brat. The summer before? It was all about our girl Barbie. But this year, culture seems to have hit the reset button. This is the Summer of Nothing. But, don’t freak out—it’s actually ok.
- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡
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WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MARKETING TODAY?
Google takes on Duolingo, Reddit throws us a lifeline & Pinterest adds courses for marketers
Google is building a Duolingo rival into the Translate app.
Everyone’s favourite (or least favourite, depending on how often you have to be reminded to take your French lessons) big green owl is, for the first time ever, being challenged. Google Translate has been around forever, since before the days of Duolingo’s chaos, but it always kind of, well, sucked.
Now, it’s harnessing the power of AI language learning tools, which is rolling out now in beta. The new feature can create customised language lessons based on your skill level, and even your reason for learning, like going on holiday. It can also translate in real time. Watch out, Duo, you may not be top bird for much longer.
Reddit has already published their 2026 Key Moments listing.
No, we haven’t even reached Halloween yet. But Reddit doesn’t give af. It said: shut up and be productive. And as marketers, we know all too well that planning leads to better outcomes, more space to pivot, and less propensity to crash tf out when our calendars overwhelm us.
So Reddit has posted its 2026 Marketing Moments calendar, which includes a list of any major events by month, holiday, culture and lifestyle celebrations throughout the year. Considering Reddit has 110 million daily active users, many of whom come to the platform seeking product info, I would take notes. Check it out here.
Pinterest adds new elements to its academy education platform.
The other platform that’s basically a marketer's secret weapon, Pinterest, has added a new certification to Pinterest Academy, its education platform, offering a range of course that help with Pin marketing.
The idea is that whilst you learn, you can also demonstrate your knowledge via approved certifications that you can add to your website. Some of these include a new “Media Planner certification,” and a “Pinterest Performance Essentials” badge. From what I’ve learnt about Pinterest in the last year, I wouldn’t sleep on this course.
You’re so welcome x
-Sophie Randell, Writer
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DEEP DIVE
Why this summer is the season of nothingness (& why that's ok)
I’m not currently in "summer" per se, being in the Southern Hemisphere and all.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t experience it vicariously through my social media feed. (Yes, I see you shaking your ass on a yacht. Yes, I hate you for it. And yes, I'm just salty because I'm freezing my ass off and pale as an 18th century peasant with consumption.)
Anyway, there’s a whopping void I’ve noticed about the summer I’m not participating in. It’s void of, well, fkn anything.
Remember when summers had a thing?
Last year, brat green was smeared across feeds like guacamole at a bottomless brunch. The year before, Barbie pink turned every brand activation into a Mattel marketing wet dream. There were songs of the summer, movies of the summer, colours of the summer. Cocktails were branded. But this year it's eerily... bland. Silent, almost. The summer of nothingness. A cultural shrug emoji.
Scroll your feed and you’ll see the problem: it’s not that trends don’t exist. It’s that there are too many of them, too fast, too small. Nothing gets room to breathe.
The sheer velocity of micro-trends means culture feels less like a shared playlist and more like a Discord server where everyone’s listening to their own thing on loop.
This is fragmentation on steroids. No unifying vibe, no monoculture moment, no one trend to rule them all. Every corner of the internet has its own “song of the summer,” and no two playlists overlap. And the result is that culture feels blegh. Not dead, but absolutely drowned in noise.
The economy plays a part here, too. When people are broke, anxious, and tired, you don’t get brat summers. You get survival summers (girl, the tariffs). Brands aren’t splashing big dollars on cultural takeovers, consumers aren’t rallying behind big, bold vibes, and risk-aversion leads to aesthetic beige blegh.
I don’t know if it's just me, but this “nothingness” is actually telling.
Maybe it’s not a cultural failure, but a reset (please be a reset.)
The Barbie summer was orchestrated by a freaking marketing army. Brat summer had a rare perfect storm of music, memeability, and aesthetic stickiness. But lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice, or three times, in this sense. And you can’t manufacture lightning every year.
The lack of a vibe might be proof that the internet is finally rejecting the forced monoculture moments brands have been trying to shove down our throats.
So then, what does this mean for marketers?
IMO, stop hunting for the moment. It’s not coming. Instead, zoom into the small, specific, resonant stuff. I've said it before and I’ll say it again, micro-communities are where culture actually lives now.
A single subcultural reference can be more powerful than another round of “official brand pink.” It was getting hard to look at, anyway.
Pick a lane, not the highway: you don’t need to “own culture,” you just need to own a niche that makes sense for your brand. One strong micro-moment > chasing the ghost of monoculture.
Go slow to go sticky: trends now burn out in days. Instead of scrambling to hop on every one, focus on creating work that can live longer… even if it’s only in front of a smaller audience. Longevity is the new virality.
Become a curator, not a conductor: culture is too fragmented to orchestrate. So curate what resonates with your community, amplify it, and let them carry it. You’re not making the anthem, you’re making the playlist.
Embrace smallness: in an attention economy this fragmented, intimacy wins. A “nothing” summer is your chance to build something that matters to 1,000 people, not 1 million.
This season of nothingness is both a warning and an opportunity.
The warning: monoculture isn’t coming back. The opportunity: if you stop trying to dominate everything, you can matter deeply to someone.
Maybe that’s what this year’s summer anthem is: not brat, not Barbie, but a chorus of fragmented, niche-specific vibes, each one sung too quietly to go viral, but loud enough for the people who care.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
TREND PLUG
Get the f*ck off my expo, chef, now!
People getting up in your grill is the worst. So sometimes, for the sake of setting things right, you gotta do it right back - loudly.
That level of desperation is captured well in one of many noisy scenes from the comedy-drama series The Bear. In the episode "Review", Carmy screams at Sydney when she doesn't budge from his expeditor role (or "expo", the person who yells orders to the kitchen):
Naturally, TikTok users have grabbed onto the audio of Carmy's freakout and applied it to their own situations where calm impatience quickly turned into deafening rage. Because whether your group project has a sloppy presentation or people are trying to talk to you while you're in a rush, sometimes the only solution is to GET LOUD.
How you can jump on this trend:
Grab this sound, put the camera on yourself and set the filming speed to 2x or 3x. Lip-sync with the slowed down audio and film yourself trying to do something uninterrupted (or trying to interrupt someone else). Then, add some onscreen text describing a situation when you either needed space, or needed someone to vacate the space expeditiously.
When filming the screamy part, try being as physically expressive as you can! The sped-up video will exaggerate your movements and make the climax of your clip even more dramatic!
A few ideas to get you started:
When someone talks over you and takes over the meeting you organised
When the content strategy deck is bland and missing your client's logos, fonts and brand colours
When your coworker finishes with the microwave and doesn't immediately take their food out
- Devin Pike, Copywriter
FOR THE GROUP CHAT
😲WTF: MASSIVE Mining Disaster
✨Daily inspo: the underdog story
😊Soooo satisfying: hydraulic press!
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Chicken and shrimp rasta pasta
ASK THE EDITOR
I’m the marketing manager for a mortgage company. What kind of video content should I be making? - Blake
Hi Blake!
There are so many ways you can create content around a service like this. One of the easiest content styles you can use is just answering FAQs you get. You can create a list of questions clients ask or have ChatGPT to help you come up with some. Or you can find others in your industry who already have a following and see what people ask them in the comments.
Once you have a list of questions you can answer, record your team answering them. At the end of each video, ask the audience to put more questions for you to answer in the comments. You can always branch out and try other content styles over time. But this is an easily repeatable, low production content style that allows you to show off your expertise.
- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡
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