Over the last couple months, we've been working on a new community called The Build. Now, we want to invite you to be part of it.

In the past, we've done one-off webinars on topics like Creating an easily repeatable content system and Building an AI brain for your business. But after a webinar’s over, the hard part is knowing how to actually implement what you’ve just learnt. This is why we’ve created The Build. It’s a community where you not only get access to every workshop we do, but you also get to be part of a group of people to build alongside.

Inside The Build, you get:

✅ Weekly LIVE workshops (+ all recordings)
✅ Your social media + AI systems questions answered in the community board
✅ Templates, resources + walkthroughs to help you create your own AI & content systems

If you’ve been looking for a peer group of business owners, this is for you.

If you’re like me, you’ll be coming down with a BAD CASE of Bieber fever this week. I genuinely think I need 3 – 5 business days to recover from that performance. If I could. I would just write about that. All day. Period. Maybe I need to be a festival journo lol. Anyway! Let’s talk about the art of the Coachella billboard, because it’s Bieberchella adjacent, but also because they were FIRE this year.

Brands and artists lined Interstate 10, the only road that leads to the festival in the Colorado desert. Every year they go viral, and every year it’s a fierce competition as to who has the most striking one. My favourite contenders: Kali Uchis, Euphoria, Teddy Swims, Ethel Cain, and Karol G.

Ok, huge news for the keyboard warriors out there. Your rage bait didn’t quite hit as hard as you intended? Was your Ultimate Burn blunted by your typo? Well fear not. You can now edit your comments on Instagram.

This has been a much-requested feature update. However, there’s a time limit on your composition corrections. In a press release, Instagram said that users will be able to edit their comments within 15 minutes of posting. And there’s no limit on how many times users can edit a comment within that time frame.

Obviously, editing comments is a dicey issue for social platforms. If you can alter the original meaning and context of a comment, you can alter the implications. So, if someone posted a comment saying that they agree with a post, and that comment then got a lot of likes, the commenter could then edit their reply to say the opposite, which could then suggest that a lot of people disagree with the implication of the post. Meanwhile, I’m just trying to cover up the fact that I said their instead of they’re, damn.

Lastly, The Drum just reported that new data from Kantar shows a marked reduction in diverse body types in ads. Yeah, and the sky is blue. If you haven’t noticed, every celebrity event now looks like the Hunger Games, meaning skinny is back. And with a vengeance.

Apparently, these findings represent a “major shift in the different bodies we’re seeing on our screen,” indicating that “body diversity seems to have fallen off adland’s radar.” Unfortunately, I did not need a crystal ball to have called that for 2026.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

All Millennials will remember the iconic “duck face.” Despite being the target of extreme ridicule, the duck face was prominent throughout every MySpace and Bebo profile during the mid-2000s.

It was silly, even a little ironic. It was Hot Girl Sh*t.

The way we present our faces online has continued to evolve since then. We've gone from ironic performance to performative detachment, and again to something even stranger; a split in our culture. Between hyper-curated AI avatars or “Instagram face” and aggressive authenticity. Let's take a look at how we got here.

The millennial duck face was an invitation. Exaggerated pouts, strategic angles, high-energy expressions. Peace signs and tongue-out poses. This was truly the Main Character era - the birth of the selfie as a tool for validation where the signal was aspirational effort. But also, the pre-cringe era, where we were free.

The performance was obvious and that was fine. Everyone understood you were trying and nobody was pretending otherwise. The duck face communicated: I am putting in effort to look good, and I want you to notice.

The duck face said: if you’re Pete Wentz and you just HAPPEN to stumble across my Bebo, I better be pouting to the gods, and you better marry me for it.

The Gen Z pout is a barrier.

The sulky expression, the SSRI stare, relaxed features, slightly parted lips, vacant deadpan “I’m medicated to the nines and I don’t care about anything” look. This is performative unbotheredness, a shield against cringe culture.

This was a direct reaction to millennial “try-hard” energy. By appearing numb or dissociative, you communicate that you're too cool to care about the act of taking a photo. The effort is still there, but now you're performing effortlessness. The pout says: I'm so unbothered by validation that I barely registered this photo was happening.

The pout says: I’m a cool girl and cool girls don’t smile.

Where the millennial face was an invitation to engage, the Gen Z face is a deflection. Don't perceive me too much. I'm here but I'm not really here (because I’m high as kite, or want to look like I am.)

Now we see the road ahead of us split into two conflicting directions. The next stage of digital faces isn't one aesthetic - it's a binary choice that reveals your values.

Path one: The lobby face (hyper-surrealism)

The Instagram Face evolved. Thanks to GLP-1s and the excessive promotion of cosmetic procedures, we are now seeing an AI-adjacent, doll-like aesthetic where your face looks like it's in a rendering state - perfectly smooth, symmetrical, almost alien – definitely not real.

The lobby face. Like you're waiting in the metaverse lobby for your actual body to load.

The signal is status through technology. Your body is a project, and you have the resources to maintain an inhumanly perfect digital avatar. Filters, surgery, makeup, lighting - all deployed to achieve a face that looks less human and more like an optimised version of human. Because you are optimised – because you can afford to be.

This is the same logic as the AI surrealism we're seeing in fashion. Lean into the synthetic. Make the digital intervention obvious. Your face becomes art direction.

Path two: the ugly shot (aggressive authenticity)

The ugly shot isn't actually ugly, but a high-status performance of being real. The 0.5x wide-angle distortion. Intentionally bad lighting. Blurry night-out photos. Zoomed-in weird expressions. Bleached brows, messy hair and makeup. Strategic imperfection.

The signal is status through rejection. You're cool enough that you don't need to look traditionally pretty to be relevant. This is anti-design of the face. It says: I'm so secure in my social position that I can post unflattering photos and it doesn't matter.

But make no mistake - this is still curated. The ugly shot requires knowing exactly which kind of ugly reads as authentic versus actually unflattering. It's performed authenticity, carefully calibrated to signal that you're not performing. And it’s also privileged, because it takes a certain amount of pretty to pull off ugly, and get away with it.

We're choosing between being perfectly synthetic or strategically messy. And both choices are responses to the same problem: AI made polish cheap, which made authenticity expensive.

The lobby face leans into synthetic perfection as aesthetic statement. The ugly shot rejects it as proof of human realness. One says status through technology. One says status through rejection. Both are performances and both are calculated.

Your face is no longer a static thing you have - it's a variable tool you deploy depending on what you want to signal. Instagram Face for aspirational content. Ugly shot for authentic moments. The mask is whatever serves the performance.

Are we moving toward a world where your face is strategic currency? The millennial duck face was singular; everyone did the same pose because everyone wanted the same signal. The Gen Z pout was also uniform - detachment as universal aesthetic.

But now? You toggle between hyper-synthetic and aggressively authentic depending on context. Your face becomes a tool for different platforms, different audiences, different moments. The performance is the switching itself.

If the Millennials were performative and Gen Z is dissociative, a new subculture, spearheaded by figures like Clavicular, is moving toward the purely biological.

In the era of looksmaxxing and frame-mogging, the "digital mask" isn't a pout or a filter; it’s the obsessive optimisation of bone structure and horizontal volume. It moves the performance away from the "software" of expression and into the "hardware" of the skeleton.

In this world, "status" isn't signaled by how you move your face, but by the fixed width of your shoulders (the frame) and the prominence of your collarbones. To "mog" someone is to exist in the same physical or digital space and rendered them invisible simply by having superior genetic proportions.

It is the ultimate "blackpill" conclusion to our digital evolution: if the face can be faked with AI and filters, the only thing left that is "real" is the bone.

We have reached a strange terminal point.

We started with the duck face, a fun, albeit a little desperate human plea to be seen as attractive. We moved to the SSRI stare, a plea to be seen as coolly detached. We arrived at the lobby face, which turned us into polished avatars.

But with this frame-mogging bullshit, the "mask" has become the body itself. We aren’t performing a mood at all—we are performing a blueprint.

Whether we are leaning into the hyper-synthetic or the aggressively authentic, the goal remains the same: to survive the gaze of the camera. The digital mask hasn’t slipped—it’s just become permanent, tangible. We’ve stopped trying to show people how we feel and started trying to prove that we exist in the most perfected version possible.

The duck face was a joke we were all in on.

The new digital face is a war of attrition where the only way to win is to stop being human and start being a masterpiece of geometry. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

For context: beauty YouTuber Tati Westbrook dropped a 40-minute video called "Breaking My Silence" accusing Shane Dawson and Jeffree Star of manipulating her into making a video that tanked James Charles' career.

While watching it live, Tati says "so how is it that so many editorial outlets knew that something was coming?" and Shane, absolutely cooked, snaps back with "BECAUSE YOU MESSAGED DRAMA CHANNELS. OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD." And then proceeds to spiral in real time before abruptly ending the stream. Unhinged. Legendary. Iconic. You name it. Now a TikTok sound. You still with me?

People are using it to show any moment where they completely lost the plot. A few of my fave examples:

Using the sound, film your reaction to your own snapping moment and put your situation as the on-screen text.

A few ideas to get you started:

-abdel khalil, brand & marketing exec

😂Yap’s funniest home videos: Literally swooped in on him
❤How wholesome: She thought she lost her dog until…
😊Soooo satisfying: Ultimate Jell-O Crush
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Soy Egg Noodle Recipe

Hey Catherine!

Don't worry—speaking on camera isn't a requirement for virality. Think about it for a second. There are so many successful videos that don't feature anyone speaking at all (I mean, look at meme accounts for instance). What is a non-negotiable is good storytelling. All viral videos will have a story structure of setup, conflict, resolution. And they will have some kind of emotional resonance that makes people connect with them.

So if you’re camera-shy, that’s okay. Just don’t let it become the excuse that holds you back from creating content. Instead of thinking about whether you should talk on camera, you should think about what the human truth is you're trying to convey. Because there are many ways to tell a compelling story. Talking is just one of them.

- 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.