Your ATTN Please
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Your ATTN Please || Wednesday, 29 October

Your ATTN Please || Wednesday, 29 October

October 29, 2025

Every time a Hustle Bro™ buys a podcast mic, a fairy loses its wings.

Or however the saying goes. We’re living in a time where we’re told to optimise every facet of our lives—our wellbeing, our careers, our relationships, and even our so-called free time. So when a corner of the internet gives us permission to slow down, take a breath, and touch grass (voluntarily!), it stands out. Just look at @hikingshawty, who’s built a following of 200k just from posting photos of her walks. Soft content’s the pushback against brain rot, grind culture, and the idea that faster = better.

- 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?

IG shows teens harmful content (again), Cutting back screen time is a myth & Anti-FaceID glasses are here

Instagram shows more "eating disorder adjacent" content to vulnerable teens, internal Meta research shows.

I sh*t you not, every single day there is something new about Meta being the most unsafe place for young people on the internet. It’s freaking crazy. I don’t blame parents at all for wanting to put guardrails in place. At least Meta is taking it upon itself to do the research internally, demonstrating its “commitment to understanding its products.”

Meta surveyed over a thousand teens during the 2023–2024 school year to see how often Instagram made them feel bad about their bodies. Then, for a few months, they looked at what content those teens were being served on the app.

Among the 223 teens who said Instagram often tanked their body image, about 10.5% of their feed was filled with “eating disorder–adjacent content.” For everyone else, that kind of stuff made up just 3.3% of what they saw. Basically: the worse teens felt, the more harmful content they were fed. Sick!

There's no such thing as cutting back on "Screen Time".

Screen time isn’t just a bad habit to kick; it’s basically the tempo of modern life. At least, according to Ian Bogost, Director of Film and Media studies at Washington University. He argues that trying to “cut down” is like trying to breathe less air. From the first TV panics in the 50s to the smartphone guilt of today, we’ve obsessed over how long we look at screens instead of realising that everything is a screen now.

Work, socialising, school, driving, even pumping gas. Screen time isn’t a number to shrink—it’s the ecosystem we live in: fast, fragmented, and impossible to escape. You can manage it a little, but you can’t fully opt out. Not anymore, sweetie.

Paranoid? Try Zenni’s anti-facial recognition glasses.

The online glasses store Zenni is offering a new coating for its lenses that the company says will protect people from facial recognition tech. How tf does that work? Great question! The ID Guard, as Zenni calls it, is a pink sheen added to the surface of the glasses. This sheen reflects the infrared light used by some facial recognition cameras.

Ok but do they actually work? Also a great question. Yes, technically: It’s impossible to open an iPhone with FaceID while wearing them. And they black out the eyes of the wearer in photos taken with infrared cameras.

However, it doesn’t work for all facial recognition forms. If someone were to take a picture of your naked face with a normal camera in broad daylight while you’re wearing them, they can likely still put your face through a database and get a match. Welp.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

DEEP DIVE

Maybe we all just need to go for a walk...

**You know when you complain about a serious life event to your mom and she hits you with some sh*t like, “maybe just get some fresh air and eat a banana, dear”?**

Who knew that was actually sound advice?

And for Charlotte Ward, better known online as @hikingshawty, it’s not only counsel, but also the secret to her success. Because she has somehow built an entire online world out of that exact philosophy.

Every day, she takes a walk through the Yorkshire woods before dinner. Then she posts three photos of her walk, and one of her meal afterward. That’s it. No lengthy captions, brand sponsorships or calls to action.

Just the simple rhythm of movement and nourishment.

Since launching her account in April 2024, Charlotte Ward has grown to over 170,000 followers and built a community of nearly 200,000 called “today i walked…”

It's a quiet (and wholesome) corner of X filled with photos of muddy paths, steaming mugs, and sunsets. People from all over the world have joined in, sharing their own daily walks and the small joys that follow. It’s refreshingly… uneventful.

And that’s exactly why it feels so good.

In the broader landscape of content, where everyone’s optimising, posting, performing, or experimenting with AI avatars, Charlotte’s account feels like a rebellion.

It’s the digital equivalent of turning your phone face-down and breathing - an extension of the great log off culture we’re witnessing as of late.

Her walks aren’t trying to teach you something or make you buy something or indoctrinate you to some polarised ideology.

They’re just there, small records of a day lived offline, then gently shared online. A digital resting point, a slow soft reminder to do the things that make you feel human, and the literal manifestation of “touch grass.”

It’s a return to a version of the internet that feels almost extinct: the pre-algorithm era and “posting ennui”, when social media wasn’t yet “content,” it was just communication.

When people posted burnt pancakes and blurry sunsets because they wanted to, not because they thought it would perform. In that sense, @hikingshawty isn’t even documenting nature, she’s documenting nostalgia.

Her popularity points to a bigger cultural appetite for what I’d call slow content, the kind that resists virality, that exists in real time, that reminds us of the world beyond our screens. It’s the digital parallel to the slow fashion or slow food movements: a pushback against disposability and excess. It’s indicative of the start of something gentler, a shift in how we use the internet, and I’ve spoken about this before.

This kind of soft content is a direct response to the digital fatigue we’re all high key experiencing.

We’ve been living through years of chaos posting, meta humour, and “brain rot” culture, and while that era had its fun, it’s also f*cking exhausting.

Even the most terminally online among us are craving something different now: sincerity, quiet, repetition. A slower pace.

Scrolling through “today I walked…” feels like being let in on a secret. Participating in it feels almost like the antidote to our collective burnout might not be logging off completely but simply posting differently. With less irony. Less speed. More intention.

What Charlotte has built acts as a collective exhale. And it’s a reminder that small rituals still matter, even - especially - online.

Maybe mom was onto something after all.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

TREND PLUG

You'll be eating breakfast and you'll go, “GET ME OUT OF HERE!"

This trend's for the ones who just want out. O. U. T. No further explanation needed.

During an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in July, comedian Megan Stalter discussed starring in the series Too Much, which filmed in London. When asked how she found the city, she told Colbert in her own chaotic, screechy way:

"I think that London is so fun, and sometimes once in a while, you'll be eating breakfast and you'll go GET ME OUT OF HERE…"

Lord knows what Megan experienced there to make her shriek the way she did (brace your ears, first-time listeners). But everyone's been there, right? Not in London - in a place of pure escapist desperation. From dealing with a hyperactive brain to surviving the horrors of university, we've all been in a state of such utter chaos that all that mattered was getting the hell away from the nonsense enveloping us.

How you can jump on this trend:

Put the camera on yourself, take this sound and lip-sync with it, starting from "And sometimes once in a while..." and ending on Megan's deafening "GET ME OUT OF HERE!" Then, add onscreen text describing the situation you're dying to escape!

For extra impact, see if you can physically show the thing eating away at you - and of course, try looking as distressed as possible when you let out that horrendous screech.

A few ideas to get you started:

How it feels when the 11am "1-hour meeting" starts eating into lunchtime
When you're at a networking event and the 17th business bro tries selling you their "revolutionary" AI product
When your client asks for a "quick 5-minute call", then lectures you with a grocery list of grievances

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

FOR THE GROUP CHAT

😂Yap’s funniest home videos: He’s a good boy for not bolting
❤How wholesome: i love when women <4
😊Soooo satisfying: Snow scrapping>
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: One Pan Chicken Shawarma

ASK THE EDITOR

Does removing a Reel from your main grid affect its performance? And should you treat the main grid and the Reels tab as different mini-platforms? – Grace

Hey Grace!

No, removing a Reel from your main grid does not affect its performance in the algorithm. The only thing that truly affects performance is the quality of the story you're telling in any piece of content. It makes no difference where that post lives.

As for treating the main grid and the Reels tab as separate platforms, that's not really a helpful way to think about your content. Instead, think about it this way: your audience engages with individual posts you make, so you should focus on making each one compelling. That's literally the only thing you should care about.