Your ATTN Please
Posts
Your ATTN Please | Wednesday, 20 August

Your ATTN Please | Wednesday, 20 August

August 20, 2025

The Authenticity Movement™ brought us crying influencers and snarky brand tweets with spelling mistakes.

That perfectly-aesthetic-to-messy-but-relatable arc is one almost every brand has traversed over the last 10 years. So much so, that now we’re all questioning how “authentic” those behind-the-scenes TikToks or GRWM “confessions” really are. So when “being real” becomes just another curated piece of content (and audiences are sceptical AF), where do we go from here?

- 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 2-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. Just a few spots left so get in quick.

Choose your city 👇

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN MARKETING TODAY?

Meta chatbots are problematic, The new UFC involves robots & FDA debunks whipped sunscreens

Is Meta AI a cause for concern? Not in the way you might think.

The social media giant is currently facing backlash (shock) over what it permits its AI chatbots to say. In this case, allowing it to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.” I beg your finest FKN pardon????

An internal Meta Policy document seen by Reuters has revealed the policies on chatbot behaviour. These include creepy interactions with children, generating false medical information and helping users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.” Meta has confirmed the document's authenticity, but claims the standards don’t necessarily reflect “ideal or even preferable” generative AI outputs…. Erm, but they have been permitted, right?

While we’re on the subject of problematic (and scary) Meta chatbot behaviour, one by the name of “Big sis Billie” recently led a cognitively impaired elderly man into New York City, believing he was engaging in a romantic rendezvous, where he tragically fell and died. Yes. I’m for real.

This poses major concerns about why the hell Meta even allows chatbots to 1) Tell users they are real people, and 2) Initiate romantic conversations. Similar conversations have been raised about virtual companions, especially those aimed at children. Recently, the mother of a 14-year-old boy in Florida sued Character.AI, alleging that a chatbot modelled on a “Game of Thrones” character caused his suicide. Scary times.

Humanoid robots are beating each other to pulp in an underground fight club.

What’s the first rule of Fight Club? … let the humanoid robots have it out? This is REK – an entirely robotic fight club operated by virtual reality entrepreneur and fighting robot enthusiast Cix Liv. And he believes it’s the next UFC. Except, like, terrifying.

"This is going to be the next [Ultimate Fighting Championship]," Liv told Vance. "When [my robot is] walking around and he has full swords, you can feel the pounding in the ground. You know deep in your soul that this thing could kill you. It’s like when you see a lion or something and the hairs go up on the back of your neck." Haha… please say syke.

FDA issues warning letters to Supergoop! and Vacation over mousse and "whipped" sunscreens.

I’ll trim the fat and give you the long story short – these products are not effective for sun protection. Such many cases with fad products like these. Just be a normal person and use the non-novelty lotion. Your skin will thank you.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

DEEP DIVE

When authenticity becomes a commodity, what replaces it as the Big Selling Point?

For the last decade, marketing has had an unhealthy fixation on “authenticity.”

Be real. Be raw. Be human. Strip away the polish, let the seams show, invite people behind the curtain. Brands scrambled to sound like friends. Influencers built empires on relatability. Even typos, grainy selfies, and unfiltered rants have become part of the performance.

However, in its overused, excessive state, the mask began to slip. Everyone knows by now that influencers are curated, brand voices are crafted, and that “just like us” moment was probably storyboarded weeks in advance.

And now, with AI writing half the captions, scripts, and ad copy you see, even “authentic voice” feels slippery. Who’s really talking to you?

If everything is curated, if authenticity itself has become a commodity, then what comes after?

Authenticity used to be refreshing because it, unlike anything else, broke the “script.” It was a much-needed departure from stiff, corporate polish. But when everyone is “real,” the performance loses its edge. “Just be yourself” turned into a strategy deck. The wink became the brand. And the brand became, well, just like everyone else.

Which means we’ve now reached a saturation point where audiences don’t just consume content—they consume the mechanics behind it.

They know the game. They can sense the hand of the social media manager. They can smell when “relatable” was rehearsed. We live in a culture that binge-watches behind-the-scenes breakdowns, that shares bloopers more than films, that reads between the lines as a form of entertainment.

You can’t fool them. In that landscape, being “authentic” no longer cuts through.

So, what replaces authenticity?

What becomes the new currency of attention and trust? Well, one possibility is what you might call meta-trust. It’s not about performing realness, but about acknowledging the performance itself.

Brands and creators who come out on top in this era won’t be “acting authentic.” They will own the fact that they are indeed performing. The curtain is already pulled back, so the only move left is to step through it with your audience.

It’s not raw, it’s recursive. Not intimacy, but transparency.

There’s also something deeper at stake here.

Audiences are tired of authenticity as aesthetic. What they are actually searching for is resonance. Content that doesn’t just look or sound real, but that makes them feel seen and understood in a way no algorithm can fake.

Resonance is about speaking to something fundamental. It’s what happens when a piece of writing or a video or a story feels alive to you. Not because it’s unfiltered, but because it touches on a truth that exists outside of performance.

Resonance is cultivated, not manufactured. It comes from curiosity, craft, and the willingness to ask questions bigger than “how do I sound as human as possible?”

We’ve lived through the era of polish, then the era of rawness, then the era of authenticity™. Now we’re entering the post-authenticity era: a time when audiences no longer take words, images, or even faces at face value.

Now, the challenge is not proving you're real. It's proving you’re worth listening to.

What cuts through is not performance but perspective. Not relatability but resonance. Not authenticity but authorship. Because in a world where anyone or anything can generate a convincing facsimile of “real,” the rarest thing left isn’t authenticity. It’s intentionality.

And maybe that’s the new promise: not “this is authentic,” but “this is intentional.”

-Sophie Randell, Writer

TREND PLUG

You just said that you—

We've all met a liar (or, let's be honest, been one ourselves).

But it's truly something to behold when someone so blatantly contradicts themselves that you trip over your own words. In the 5th season of reality TV show Baddies (officially titled Baddies Caribbean), Sapphire Blaze had this very experience. When one of her castmates lied to her face about not speaking with someone, she told the confession cam:

"You just said that you—you just said that you—you just said that you didn't talk to her."

The sound of Sapphire's stuttering is making waves on TikTok. People are using the audio to describe moments where somebody either lied, contradicted themselves or were just straight-up confusing. Because whether your friend's not committing to the hangout or your mom's flip-flopping on how "grown up" you are, you're always dealing with people who don't tell the truth - or at least, keep changing their truth.

How you can jump on this trend:

Take this sound, put the camera on yourself and lip-sync with only the "you just said" parts of the audio. Then, add onscreen text describing a situation where you caught someone fibbing or flip-flopping.

A few ideas to get you started:

Seeing new hires after your boss said he can't afford to pay you overtime
When your work bestie says she'll back from her holiday on Monday, but she doesn't show up
When this morning's meeting was "moved to tomorrow", but you get a Teams message asking why you weren't there

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

FOR THE GROUP CHAT

😲WTF: Africa Wants A New Map!
❤How wholesome: everyone’s reaction was so wholesome?
🎧Soooo tingly: the perfect peel doesn’t exi-
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: mall style chicken teriyaki

ASK THE EDITOR

What tips do you have for staying consistent with posting content? - Jackson

Hey Jackson!

There's no magic formula to staying consistent! At some point, you just have to carve out time and get it done. But one thing you can do to make that a bit easier is to come up with an easily repeatable content style. At TAS, we call this ERC. This is a content style that is easy to produce, and, ideally, one you can create in bulk. It should also be something you can do over and over, only changing one factor for each video.

This should fit your niche, but could be something like street interviews, simple games, reaction videos, or answering FAQs about your industry. When you've got this content style, you'll no longer need to reinvent the wheel every time you need to create content. You're essentially taking 90% of the thinking out of it, which makes it much more likely you're going to post more regularly. Then, remember that done is better than perfect. You will learn as you go, and that's ok.