Your ATTN Please || Tuesday, 21 October

October 21, 2025

Remember when your brand’s website was like the holy grail of your online presence?

You had flashy animations. Pop-up promos. And a hero video that took 3-5 business days to load. Now? Most websites are more like my brain at 9am on a Monday morning—the lights are on but no one’s home. Which means your brand identity isn’t a sweet little bit of copy on your About page. It’s a living, breathing entity that exists everywhere your audience is. It’s remixed in your TikTok comments, in Reddit threads and everywhere in between. You no longer control the narrative. Now, it’s co-created.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

Tired of posting “great” content that gets ignored?

You’re hitting “publish,” but something's off. As in, you're not getting comments, followers, or sales.

The problem? You don't know how to tell a good story. You know, one your audience cares about. Because when they buy into your story, they buy into your brand.

In this 90-minute workshop, we’ll show you how to use storytelling to make your brand un-ignorable.

What you’ll learn:

✅ How to create content that builds trust, gets engagement & creates loyal followers
✅ How to build an emotional connection with your audience
✅ The 3 crucial elements every story NEEDS

You'll leave with practical frameworks you can apply right away. Bring your questions and we’ll bring everything we’ve learnt from growing an audience of 3.2M followers.

30 Oct | 8:30-10:00 NZT | $49 (recording included!)

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MARKETING TODAY?

Netflix collabs with Spotify, Wikipedia’s on its last leg & Music videos are a dying art

What in the crossover episode? Netflix jumps into podcasts (??) with Spotify deal.

On Tuesday, the streaming service announced a partnership with Spotify, bringing numerous video podcasts on sports, culture, entertainment and true crime onto the platform. The deal also means certain shows will no longer be airing on YouTube, Netflix’s main competitor. There are said to be 16 shows in the deal, produced by Spotify Studios and The Ringer, the website and podcasting network that Bill Simmons started and that Spotify acquired in 2020.

Roman Wasenmüller, a VP at Spotify, said in a statement that the deal “marks a new chapter for podcasting.” Others, argue “podcasts are not television,” calling it “the latest move to consolidate the entirety of human expression onto a single screen.”

Will AI be what finally kills Wikipedia? ☹

Guys, I feel like bad things will happen if we let Wikipedia die. It is imperative to our humanity that we don’t let Wikipedia die. It’s the last good place on the internet. The Wikimedia Foundation, which works to distinguish between traffic from humans and bots, reported that human pageviews have fallen 8% year-over-year.

Why? Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation says it’s “the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information,” particularly as “search engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like ours” and as “younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web.”

He also underscores the importance of supporting content integrity and content creation:

“When you search for information online, look for citations and click through to the original source material,” he writes. “Talk with the people you know about the importance of trusted, human curated knowledge, and help them understand that the content underlying generative AI was created by real people who deserve their support.”

"No one makes money from them": with MTV channels switching off, is the music video under threat?

Wikipedia… Music videos… the light from our eyes. WHAT ELSE will they steal from us!? I thought Paramount was going to REVIVE MTV. Not SHUT THE WHOLE THING DOWN. It’s the end of an era. MTV has slowly become more of a nostalgic memory in recent years, with YouTube being the primary location for music videos. However the move has The Guardian questioning whether music videos even still serve as a viable outlet for expression and promotion. PLEASE. Of course it does.

The music video is a visual translation of music/ art. An extension of expression. To take that away would be sacrilegious. And to say that “no one makes money out of them” completely overlooks the concept of a “body of work.”  Anyway. What do I know. 

DEEP DIVE

Does anybody even read websites anymore?

Okay, imma need you to be honest with me: when was the last time you actually read a brand’s website?

And I don’t mean skimming for a menu link or scrolling to find an email address… I mean read it, intentionally and thoughtfully, like you cared about what it was trying to tell you.

Exactly.

This is why I feel like recently, websites have ever so quietly stopped being the centre stage for brand storytelling.

Once upon a time, your website was your digital house.

You’d welcome people in, show them around, and maybe impress them with your quirky copy about “disrupting the future of [insert industry]". But now, nobody’s showing up. Like that dusty old gas station on the side of a once popular highway, left to rot once the public found a faster route.

And that’s exactly it. Because now, people discover brands through TikTok, build trust through newsletters, and get convinced to buy on Instagram or LinkedIn. These “routes” are a more natural part of our scroll. They're more immediate, less of a task.

And thus, the homepage is no longer where your story begins.

This shift is bigger than just “we spend more time on social.” It’s about how distribution has replaced destination.

A decade ago, your website was THE final word. You owned the space, the tone, the navigation. Every pixel was a controlled experience. Now, brand storytelling lives in ecosystems you don’t own: Substack, TikTok, YouTube, even Medium or Reddit threads. These platforms have trained audiences to expect stories that feel human, reactive, and, most importantly, alive.

Meanwhile, a website just kinda … sits there (hellooo, anyone home?).

It’s no surprise then, that this migration has come with a sort of loss of control for brands.

Because when your story is fragmented across a dozen platforms, it’s hard to know who’s holding the pen. The Substack version of your voice might be warm and reflective. Your TikTok might be chaotic and meme-coded. Your LinkedIn presence? Obviously polished and vaguely inspirational, like a founder mid-morning-whimhoff-breathwork-lightbulb-moment.

It’s cohesive in spirit, maybe, but not really in form.

That means we’re in this strange in between era: brands want to feel personal like creators but still be consistent like companies. And the old rules of brand architecture don’t apply when every platform speaks a different dialect.

That’s why storytelling today isn’t about where you tell the story, but how adaptable your narrative is.

Can it survive being filtered through trends, reposted by fans and remixed by the algorithm? Can it sound like you even when someone else is the one saying it?

Because whether we like it or not, storytelling has become a shared exercise. You don’t get to write the whole thing anymore, sweetie—you just set the tone.

The internet fills in the rest.

So yeah, we very rarely read websites anymore. But now, we read voices, follow personalities and subscribe to people who resonate and make us feel something. If your brand can actually do that, consistently, across borrowed spaces, you’re freaking winning, friend.

Your website can and still needs to exist, of course. It just might not be the living room anymore. Maybe it’s the backyard, where you end up with a vodka soda, after chasing the story through the wild (www.)

TREND PLUG

“Me in my office (not mine)...”

We all put in a hard day’s work, especially in digital marketing. Some more than others. And by some, you probably mean you. 

 So with this trend, claim that CEO energy! No matter your actual arbitrary position at the company, everything we do is technically a hard day of work…right?

Today's audio comes from a slowed-down version of “INSOMNIA” by maxt4wyn; it's the kind of dark soundscape electro-chill beat that gives off hella gigachad meme vibes... (holy Gen Z buzzwords I just realised what I was typing. Sorry to everyone over the age of 30 reading this).

Usually, creators are staring out a window like they own the view, with on-screen text that reads:

It’s funny because it taps into a universal feeling! We’ve all been the bottom-rung dreamer looking up at the top, wondering what a taste of that would be like.

How you can jump on this trend:

With the sound in the background, record yourself walking up to a window, staring dramatically into the distance like everything the light touches is yours. Add your on-screen text in the “Me in my office (not mine)...” format. HUGE bonus points if you’re dressed way too seriously for what you’re doing (definitely couldn't be me).

A few ideas to get you started:

  • Me in my office (shared hot desk), overlooking the city (parking garage), after a hard day of work (choosing fonts for a campaign on my phone).

  • Me in my office (not mine), overlooking the city (the company car park), as a successful CEO (I’m the marketing intern), after a hard day of work (scrolling TikTok to do 'trend research').

  • Me in my office (a beanbag in the corner), overlooking the city (an alleyway devoid of sunlight), after a hard day of work (being cheeky and replying to social media comments on the company account).

- Nico Mendoza, Intern

FOR THE GROUP CHAT

😂 Yap’s funniest home videos: Fishing? Return to sender
❤How wholesome: Puppy picks up best friend from school!
😊Soooo satisfying: Heated iron does some crazy things
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Chicken Shawarma with Garlic Sauce 🤤 

ASK THE EDITOR

How do I create vlog content that people actually want to watch? -Jessie

Hey Jessie!

I'll preface this by saying that vlogs can be hard to pull off! But if you want to use them as a content style, the thing to remember is they need to follow the structure of a story: set up, conflict, resolution. It's tempting to think of a vlog as just a documentation of your day. But if you create one that is literally just what you did in chronological order, it will probably be pretty boring!

Instead, you should think of your vlog in terms of the wider story you want to tell. This might mean editing your footage out of order so you can tell that story effectively. So instead of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened," your vlog should convey the idea of cause and effect. This happened, therefore this happened. Each scene has some sort of challenge or conflict, which then leads to what happens next. If you use this kind of storytelling, your vlogs will come off much better than if you're just documenting your day.

- 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

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