
Tuna used to be the lunch of shame.
Something you ate at your desk, hoping no one commented on the fishy smell wafting through the office. That was, until Fishwife came on the scene. She showed up, packed in olive oil (not water!), with gorgeous hot pink packaging featuring a badass-looking lady smoking a pipe. And suddenly, tuna went from “food you bought in case of apocalypse” to a whole aspirational aesthetic. So, how did Fishwife manage to give a food as boring as tuna a total rebrand?
- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡
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WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MARKETING TODAY?
AI takes over recruiting industry, Grok lies about Bondi attack & X is (financially) on the up and up

AI staffing is now a thing, and Mercor is cashing in.
Hiring used to mean recruiters, interviews, and you know, actually taking the time to understand your potential employee. Now it increasingly means AI-mediated handshakes. Mercor, an AI-powered staffing platform, is riding a massive surge as companies look to scale workforces faster and cheaper without committing to full-time hires.
The concept is simple. AI screens candidates, matches skills to roles, and shortens the hiring cycle from weeks to days. Investors are eating it up, valuing Mercor like it’s building the LinkedIn of labour arbitrage. But critics warn this kind of scale-first hiring risks flattening workers into datasets. Efficient, yes, but eerily impersonal. The future of work is speeding up. Whether humans can keep up is another question.
Grok spreads false claims about Bondi shooting, raising trust alarms, again.
Every time a horrifying world event happens, Grok is there to push slop misinfo about it. This time, about the heart-breaking events in Bondi over the weekend, with Grok confidently presenting incorrect details as fact. The issue here is tone. Grok repeatedly delivers misinformation with the kind of certainty that makes it seem believable to the general public.
The chatbot reportedly continually misidentified 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed, the man who disarmed one of the shooters. Grok claimed the verified video of his act was an old viral video of a man climbing a tree. It also suggested that images of Ahmed were of an Israeli being held hostage by Hamas.
This is exactly the nightmare scenario critics have warned about. AI models are acting like authoritative news sources without the guardrails to handle breaking events responsibly. As X continues to push Grok deeper into the platform, the incident highlights a growing risk. When AI becomes the narrator of reality, accuracy stops being optional and starts being existential.
So then, how is X reporting higher revenue for Q3, despite, well, you know, being a cesspool?
I’m sure this gives Musk something to point at amid months of advertiser anxiety and platform chaos. The boost appears tied to cost-cutting, subscription pushes, and some advertisers randomly drifting back. It's not a full-blown comeback, but a pulse. A weak, very incapacitated pulse. Still, analysts remain cautious.
Ad revenue is volatile, trust with brands is fragile, and the platform’s long-term strategy feels more reactive than cohesive. Growth exists, but so does churn lol, of users, advertisers, and credibility. X unfortunately is not dead, but it’s not exactly thriving either. It’s surviving. Loudly and annoyingly.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
DEEP DIVE
Hold on, did Fishwife make canned tuna cool?

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always been a bit of a fan of tinned fish in general.
I love anchovies, and tuna is a great protein staple in my diet. But it has… a reputation. And I know that y’all know what I’m talking about.
For some, it’s functional, forgettable. Something you ate at your desk because it was there, not because you wanted it. For others, it was the devil's pet food, the thought of it alone, gag-worthy. And at the most, it was food without aspiration, without identity, and without a story worth telling.
And then Fishwife came along. The brand saw that emptiness and treated it like a creative brief.
Conservas culture has always existed strongly throughout the world.
In Spain and Portugal, tinned fish carries history, ritual, even romance. Somewhere along the way, that richness was flattened into bulk packs and corporate branding designed to disappear into the pantry like doomsday prep.
Fishwife reversed that flattening by treating tuna as something worth looking at, talking about, and even building a life around. From a marketing lens, it was about meaning. Far too many food products lean into novelty and burn out as fast as they shine. Fishwife was not that brand, not that product.
The most obvious signal is the packaging.
Loud colours, playful illustrations, and a visual language that feels closer to an art print than a grocery SKU. Designed by artist Danny Miller, the tins refuse the visual seriousness (and painfully boring) that dominates legacy seafood brands.
They are flirty, expressive, and absolutely gorgini. I’m not just glazing for glazing's sake. These tins are fabulous—you don’t hide them in a cupboard. You don’t want to.
You leave them out as a statement piece of their own.
And I think that matters more than it sounds.
Younger consumers are fluent in corporate aesthetics. Or, aesthetics in general, really. But that means they know what mass production looks like. When something visually resists that language, it signals independence, taste, and intention before you even really know what’s inside.
The name does similar work.
“Fishwife” pulls from a historical, gendered insult and keeps its edge intact. Rather than sanding it down, the founders leaned into it, allowing the word to feel confident and slightly confrontational. There’s no press-release feminism here. Just a sharp understanding of humour, reclamation, and cultural timing.
And crucially, the product holds up.
Fishwife sources from small-boat fisherfolk and sustainable aquaculture farms, with an emphasis on traceability and quality. Like?? Come onnn. Talk about nailing each aspect.
Tuna packed in Spanish olive oil instead of water changes the eating experience entirely. Richer texture. Better flavour. A sense that the price is justified once the fork hits the plate.
This is where many brands fail. Values are easy to talk about. Delivering a materially better product is harder. Fishwife does both without self-congratulation.
Its growth has also been deeply tied to internet literacy.
I.e. they’re the cool fish on the block.
Co-founder Caroline Goldfarb’s existing online presence meant the brand entered social spaces naturally, not as a performance. Recipes, jokes, collaborations, and events feel like participation rather than promotion. A tuna fish sandwich block party makes sense in the Fishwife universe. A stiff brand activation would absolutely not.
That looseness builds trust.
The brand understands the room, which is why attention from outlets like Vogue and Refinery29 felt earned rather than engineered.
Collaborations follow the same logic. Female-founded brands. Chilli crisp companies. Partnerships that add texture instead of reach-for-reach dilution. Each one reinforces a shared worldview rather than chasing scale for its own sake.
One of the lesser known strengths of the brand is its recipe content.
Simple, unfussy, and genuinely helpful. For audiences unfamiliar with conservas culture, recipes act as translation. They show how tinned fish fits into a life that values ease, aesthetics, and pleasure. Behaviour changes when imagination is given something concrete to work with.
What Fishwife has done here is no anomaly.
As consumers grow tired of innovation theatre, brands that cut through are often the ones willing to revisit overlooked categories and treat them with care, humour, and cultural fluency.
In this case, tuna, of all freaking things, became a canvas. Taste became identity. And a pantry staple became something people actively want to be seen with.
For marketers, the lesson isn’t about colour palettes or influencer tactics. It’s about restraint, confidence, and knowing when to let meaning emerge instead of explaining it to death.
And for you, it’s a signal of hope. If canned tuna can rebrand, so can you x
-Sophie Randell, Writer
TREND PLUG
Hello, what's up?

Today's trend is for the people who are holding it down for the whole circus.
Whether it's at work, at school, or in your friend group, your presence is irreplaceable. You're the glue, the backbone, the trick master that holds all this clown fiesta together.
The soundbite originally comes from the reality show, Mob Wives, which follows the lives of four mobster wives while their husbands are serving jail time. When asked what she had been up to by her husband, Drita quickly clapped back with what turned into the iconic line, "I'm f&%king cleaning like I'm always doing".
People are now using the line to depict the moments when they realised they accidentally became the group's operations lead, strategist, and HR department - all before the first coffee kicks in.
Some of my fav examples:
How you can jump on this trend:
Using this sound, record yourself talking to a phone, looking distressed and annoyed, while lip-syncing to the iconic line. Add OST to describe a situation that fits your role or brand.
A few ideas to get you started:
How it feels to be the only one who knows how to fix the office computer
How it feels to rewrite the brief into actual English for the fifth time this month
When the creative team is arguing again and I'm the only one that's been to therapy
-Raewyn Zhao, Intern
FOR THE GROUP CHAT
😲WTF Alien reindeer (for you xmas lovers)
❤How wholesome True love looks like
😊Soooo satisfying Rice sorting
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight Loco Moco
ASK THE EDITOR

What are some content ideas that can apply quite broadly? -Javan
Hey Javan,
There are a few ways to think about creating widely relatable content. The first is that you can look at what lots of other people are doing and copy it. Remember, everything is a remix and there are no 100% original ideas. So things like musings/quips about corporate life and workplace culture are everywhere. You can find a way to remix these to create your own version of them. You can actually train your algorithm to feed you the type of content you want to recreate, then you will constantly have inspiration for your own.
However, you should also have some sort of follower acquisition strategy rather than just posting trend content. And this will take a lot more deep thinking to find one that fits your brand. This strategy should start with asking what is something that will relate to everyone, age 16-60 and beyond? For our Attention Seeker accounts, our storylines always revolve around the concept of hierarchy. It's an idea everyone experiences, whether with their parents, siblings, or boss. So beyond remixing trend-type content, I would begin to think about what your acquisition strategy will be, because this will be the foundation for everything else you do.
- 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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