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- Your ATTN Please | Wednesday, 10 September
Your ATTN Please | Wednesday, 10 September
Post at 9am every day. Comment on 10 people’s posts. Tag 30 people in your content.
And BOOM, you’ve got a bangin’ personal brand. Except…that’s not how it works. Like, at all. Unfortunately, you can’t “hack” your way to building a magnetic personal brand. Sure, tactics have their place, but they’ll only get you so far. What you really need to do is start with your identity—who you are and who you’re trying to speak to. That’s how you attract not just “people,” but the right people.
- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡
Want to know how we got 1 billion views in 1 year?
Join Stanley Henry and Jony Lee, the brains behind our social strategy, for a 1-day intensive workshop. You’ll walk away with a full content strategy for your brand and a repeatable system for creating content that gets attention.
You’ll even get our help making content so you can confidently execute on your strategy when you go home. The next one’s happening in Auckland this Friday, 12 September.
Just a few spots left so get in quick 👇
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MARKETING TODAY?
Tesla offers Elon $1T, Marketers can now easily find niche trends & Adobe creates free video editing app
Tesla’s board wants to give Elon Musk an unprecedented $1 trillion pay package. If he can make Robotaxis work.
Oh, and the Robots, too. Considering the Tesla CEO has done just about anything but Tesla activities over the last few years (Twitter to X, relationship with DT, having about one million babies, the Department of Government Efficiency that led nowhere)… it's no surprise sales have slid dramatically.
With fierce competition from Chinese competitors only making the matter more pressing, the Tesla board has attempted to recentre Musk's efforts on the automaker. The incentive? An eye-watering $1 trillion paycheque that would force him to spend the next decade turning all of his robo-promises into actual execution. When you refuse to do your job so bad they have to bribe you with one trillion fkn dollars. Must be nice.
Here are 5 ways to research trends in your industry for your social ad campaigns.
According to Social Media Today, we should all be using the latest trends in our niche to make campaigns as effective as possible. And there are a range of tools you can use to find them. Being here on Your ATTN Please is a great start, if I do say so myself 😉
But, otherwise, here’s the short and sweet list:
Questionable, but Grok
AI powered tools: Meta has Advantage+, TikTok enables AI-creation and targeting via its Symphony platform, Pinterest has Performance+, X ads are now using Grok for targeting, LinkedIn offers Performance Max and Accelerate.
Ta da! You’re welcome x
And, at no cost, which is like unheard of for Adobe products, usually touted as the elite tool for creatives. I guess they kind of figured that thanks to TikTok and Insta, everyone, I mean like, everyone is a video editor these days. So, having to sit at a laptop to use Adobe in this day and age seemed kind of… archaic, and limiting.
Adobe announced on Thursday that it is releasing a new video editing iPhone app named Premiere on Sept. 30, but you can pre-order in the app store now. Let’s see how it fares against CapCut and Edits.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
Hey, do you like YAP?
If so, why not share it with a friend? The more we grow this thing, the more resources we can put into making it awesome for you. Even if every subscriber invites just 1 person to YAP, we’ll meet our growth goal for 2025. So, you in?
DEEP DIVE
“Identity before tactics” - what my boss taught me about building a personal brand.
My boss asked a question the other day that’s been stuck in my head ever since: Why do some people seem so magnetic online?
You know the type. They radiate sense of self. They’re not just “good at posting.” They’re the kind of people you actually want to follow. Their content feels natural, almost inevitable, and like it could only come from them.
They don’t bend themselves around trends or over-optimise their strategy. Instead, their sense of self is so assured that it becomes the foundation of their personal brand.
Stanley calls this philosophy "identity before tactics".
Because here’s the cold hard truth: “I post every day at 9 a.m. on LinkedIn” isn’t what makes someone compelling. Your personal brand isn’t a content calendar or a growth hack. It’s the identity narrative you’re actively crafting every time you show up online.
But, how do you actually even do that? Well, here’s the piece of advice that really hit me: “People like this do things like that.”
What Stanley meant was: you choose the part of your identity you want to heighten and put forward. If you want to attract curious, creative people, you show up as the version of yourself who’s always experimenting and sharing ideas. If you want to attract ambitious, driven people, you lean into the side of yourself that takes bold swings.
Your personal brand is essentially a choice: which version of yourself do you want to amplify in order to connect with the right people?
And his final piece of advice? No matter how thoughtful, polished, or authentic you are, people are going to judge you.
They’ll roll their eyes, misunderstand, and they will DEFINITELY project their own sh*t onto you. The balm for this? You have to be ready to not give a single f*ck. Because your personal brand isn’t about pleasing everyone. If you build it around being universally liked, you’ll water it down until it’s meaningless.
It’s the same as irl, I guess. If you spend your life performing in relation to others, trying to make yourself palatable, in the end, you taste bland. Forgettable.
Magnetism comes from certainty, certainty comes from clarity, and clarity means some people will be pulled closer while others will back away. But those people weren’t right for you in the damn first place.
Personal brand is about owning your identity, sharing it consistently, and attracting the people who get it.
The people who seem magnetic in real life are the ones who know who they are, live it unapologetically, and don’t contort themselves to please everyone else.
Online is no different. Identity before tactics. Narrative before hacks. And above all, the ability to truly not give a f*ck. Because that, more than any content strategy, is what makes someone impossible to ignore.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
TREND PLUG
You burned my house to the ground!
I'm not a vengeful, spiteful person, but I won't lie - nothing hits the spot quite like schadenfreude (pleasure felt from someone else's suffering).
A prime example of it can be seen in this 2022 TikTok duet between users Blaine Jordan and Mitchell Dale, where the former acts out an angry monologue as the latter smiles and shrugs:
"You burned my house to the ground! My family's dead, what do I do?! I'm gonna find you, motherf*cker I'm gonna--", Blaine screams as Mitchell goofily grins back.
The sound's recently resurged as a TikTok trend where people share moments of schadenfreude. This could be when a complaining customer sees you still working or your friend raging after a Minecraft "prank". The audio's guttural screams and floaty Super Mario 64 music make for a wonderfully oxymoronic experience where one person is clearly suffering, while the other is very much enjoying that fact.
How you can jump on this trend:
Grab this sound, flip the camera round and film yourself confidently (and a bit mockingly) smiling at the camera. Then, add OST describing a situation where someone freaked out (either at you or at someone/something else) and you took great pleasure in it.
A few ideas to get you started:
When your co-worker catches you drinking their Coke, but they didn't answer your Teams message asking if it belonged to anyone
Watching an account manager take flak from a client after warning them about their bad content strategy
Getting yelled at by your boss for ignoring their instructions and listening to their boss instead
- Devin Pike, Copywriter
FOR THE GROUP CHAT
😲WTF: Sacred Site Turning Into Resort
✨Daily inspo: Wise words from Kyrie
😊Soooo satisfying: Kinetic sand for the win
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: 15 min Shanghai Noodles
ASK THE EDITOR
How do I get people to engage more in the comments of my Reels? -Kayla
Hey Kayla!
There are lots of strategies you can try, but here's an idea: Ask your audience to do something. Let's say you make food content. So in each video, you can ask the people watching what you should make next. Let them know the top comment will be the one you choose.
Another way you could do this is to ask people to tag someone specific in the comments. So, for example, if you post relatable office content, make your caption say something like, "tag your Millennial manager" (or whatever fits that video). This can be a great way to encourage commentary and get people to share your content.
- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡
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