Your ATTN Please || Tuesday, 3 June

Brand building is slow. It’s expensive. And, to every marketer’s chagrin, it’s pretty dang hard to calculate the ROI.

Which is exactly why it’s a tough sell to higher-ups who are looking for results in the only terms they care about ($$$). But we all know building brand is your ticket to loyal customers, long-term growth, and yes, more money (eventually). The key is connecting those dots for the ones who hold the purse strings.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

How to *actually* win on Instagram in 2025

Join our team for a 90-minute workshop to find out the exact strategies we've used to grow our Instagram following to 600k+. This workshop is not about theory. It's about giving you actionable takeaways you can implement straight away.

Learn what's working on the platform right now from:

• Jony Lee, our expert short-form strategist

• Stanley Henry, founder at The Attention Seeker 

Bring your questions and we will bring everything we've learnt spending thousands of hours on Instagram. We're not gatekeeping anything, so get ready!

Friday 13 June | 8:30–10:00am NZT | $49

DEEP DIVE

How to convince your boss to invest in brand

So, you convinced your boss to let you run that cool, quirky marketing experiment.

The TikTok series. The zine. The NFT (regrets?). Nice work.

But now you’re ready for more. You’re thinking big. Long-term. You want your company to invest in brand…real brand. And that means money. Time. Patience. AKA: stuff finance teams don’t hand out like breath mints.

A recent CMO Insights report found that only 35% of marketing leaders regularly work with finance, down from 42% the year before. That’s not just a missed opportunity. That’s a disconnect that could literally tank your ability to grow.

So… if you're one of those marketers that's hesitant to ask for resources to invest in brand building, here's what to do:

First, understand your audience (no like, actually).

Every finance team is different. Some are brand believers. Some think marketing = last-click attribution. And some think “brand” is a four-letter word. You need to know who exactly you're talking to:

• The Sceptic: Thinks brand is fluffy. Likes forecasts and fast ROI. Needs proof.

• The Pragmatist: Open to brand if it’s tied to business outcomes. Needs translation.

• The Ally: Already sees brand as strategy. Needs ammo to sell it up the chain.

Translate your marketing speak into finance speak.

• Don’t say: “We need to raise awareness.” Say: “We need to increase the obtainable market.”

• Don’t say: “We’re investing in brand equity.” Say: “We’re strengthening reputation to reduce acquisition cost.”

• Don’t say: “This campaign will go viral.” Say: “This campaign could increase top-of-funnel volume by X% over Y months.”

Make your case in terms they care about:

• Market share

• Pricing power

• Retention and churn

• Customer lifetime value

• Defensibility against competitors

Introducing: Your Handy Dandy ™ brand investment to-do list (before you walk into that meeting)

1. Quantify your current brand problem. Are you over-relying on paid search? Are you seeing declining organic traffic? Do customers confuse you with competitors? Get data. Back it up.

2. Identify the opportunity cost. What’s the cost of not investing in brand? More spend to maintain acquisition? Stagnant growth? Weak differentiation?

3. Build a phased plan. Don’t ask for $500k and vibes. Show how you’ll test, learn, and scale. Start with a 3-month pilot. Define success.

4. Map brand activity to business outcomes. Show how your efforts will impact revenue, margins, market positioning, not just engagement.

5. Have an answer for “how will we measure this?” Hint: it’s not just last-click conversions. Think brand lift, share of search, aided/unaided recall, CAC over time.

6. Enlist allies. Get sales, product, or customer success on your side. If brand helps them, finance will listen.

Brand marketing is long-term, expensive, and not immediately shiny. 

But when done right, it's the reason a customer chooses you over the cheaper, faster, louder option. And when the economy goes sideways or growth stalls, a strong brand is the thing that keeps you afloat.

Your job? Help your CFO see the raft, not just the waves.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

Q&A WITH THE TAS TEAM

How we created a viral show by letting strangers kiss onstage

Beneath all the marketing know-how and sarcasm YAP provides you daily, there are teams of people managing several projects under The Attention Seeker (TAS) brand, including The Dating Void (TDV), our social media and live audience-based dating show.

And driving our TAS brands is Laura Oliveira, our Brand and Marketing Manager, who joined us when TDV was an idea our boss Stanley chucked at her. The goal was to produce a higher-production show that not only built partnerships with other brands, but also elevated TAS’ portfolio for future clients.

Now, a bit over a year later and after accruing millions of views and tens of thousands of followers, she calls the show her “baby”. I sat down with Laura and asked how she helped TDV become what it is today, and how blindfolded 20-somethings kissing turned into real-world business results.

So Laura, looking back to this time last year, how were you involved in the beginning of The Dating Void?

TDV was a brief that was handed to me on my third or fourth week working here. So I'd say it’s been something I've grown from the ground up. 

Because the whole purpose of creating this show was for content, how did that shape how you ran the events?

Our intention was always to get this show to go viral, so we asked “How can get the framing to stop people from scrolling? How can we get the first line people are saying to be something that hooks you in?” Because that was always the intention with the content, it then naturally translated onto the stage. And of course, when you watch the show, there's lulls and stuff that gets cut out when we're editing. But overall, I think because that is the goal with the output, it ends up being that way in real life as well.

You were eventually able to get quite a few brand partnerships on board. How did you find brands keen on a concept like TDV?

So we first had to think about who was going to come to the event and who was gonna watch the content. This was primarily people in their 20s, young, single and looking to have a little bit of fun. Then we looked for brands that we had an aligned target audience, and brands that were a little bit unconventional with their marketing, like not so square or clean, because obviously lots of crazy stuff happens at TDV. Then it was just a matter of outreach, like I just reached out to as many as I possibly could.

What were your learnings around finding those partnerships?

I learned that they didn't really care so much about the content. Our main focus was the content and going viral. But the brands I was working with at the event really cared about the real life marketing, the activation and opportunity to really get the product in the hands of their target audience. And the more we grew, the more brands wanted to get involved, and people would recommend it to their friends and so it spread word of mouth. That's how we were able to land our biggest partnerships. One of their brand managers came along to the show and thought it was a great opportunity to get their product in their target audiences’ hands!

What kind of results have you seen in running a live show like this, not just for the Dating Void brand, but for The Attention Seeker?

It's been a great brand building piece for the agency because it's something we can now show clients that we can do. It proves that we're versatile, you know. Like we not only grew our own brand, but we also started the side show. And we're able to build a social show that's a little bit higher production than your typical short form video content. I definitely think it's brought value in that way.

What are some big lessons you've learned about how to grow a brand from scratch on social media?

I've learned that no one really knows what they're doing. Of course we have so much expertise and we have so much experience here at the agency, but we can never guarantee that something's gonna work. It's really about trying and iterating, tweaking and throwing sh*t at the wall. That’s what I tell anyone trying to build a brand on social or personal brand: just do volume until you find what works. When The Dating Void was just starting out, we were posting every single day. We have scaled back now, but at the beginning we were constantly testing to see what would land, if it was the host saying this or the girl speaking first, you know?

And that's a lesson for everyone who's trying to grow on socials. Just give it a go. If it's wrong, you'll figure it out , and then you'll pivot and find a way that works for you. Even if it seems out of your reach, give it a crack, because you never know until you try.

Devin Pike, Copywriter

ASK THE EDITOR

I want to get started on Reels but I don’t feel comfortable on camera. Any tips? - Maddie

Hey Maddie!

The only way to get comfortable being on camera is to just do it. The more you practice, the faster you're going to feel (and appear) comfortable. One easy way to start is by thinking about a question your clients ask you all the time. Pick up your phone and create a short video answering it, just like you were talking to them.

Because you have conversations with your clients about that topic all the time, it should be reasonably easy to film yourself answering that question. You can probably come up with quite a few pieces of video content by doing that. Don’t wait until you feel ready to get started because that will never happen. So you might as well just go for it.

- 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.

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