Four brand and marketing insights from our team, delivered every month.
Subscribe here.
The Best Branding Framework I Probably Can’t Put in the Subject Line
I think RuPaul accidentally built one of the best branding frameworks in marketing.
Unfortunately, it spells C.U.N.T.
Before HR starts typing, let me explain. On RuPaul’s Drag Race, queens are judged on Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent. Tongue in cheek, yes, but more useful than half the acronyms on LinkedIn.
Talent is whether you can deliver: the product, service or strategy. It earns you a place in the competition, but talent alone doesn’t make you memorable.
That’s where the other letters matter. Charisma makes people care. Uniqueness makes you recognisable. Nerve gives people something worth discussing. Trixie Mattel built a world so distinctive you could identify it from three pink pixels. Joey Jay committed so completely to being “the first openly gay contestant” on a show full of drag queens that searches jumped 10–20x when she returned.
Meanwhile, marketing has become exceptionally good at sanding itself smooth. Safe headlines. Safe creative. Safe ideas softened by six rounds of feedback until they could belong to any brand with a Canva subscription. As Drag Race fans say: “That’s a lot of emotion… for safe.”
Most brands don’t have a talent problem. They have a distinctiveness problem.
Talent proves you deserve to compete. Charisma, uniqueness and nerve are why anyone remembers your name after the crown is handed out.
Read Kantar’s research on why difference matters more than salience →
// Brodie McMaster, Performance Strategy Lead
The Rules for Not Sounding Like AI Are Making Us Sound the Same
I’ll be the first to admit I’m quite inflexible when it comes to change. I grip tightly onto what I know and view anything new with some degree of distrust, so it should surprise nobody that I felt that way about AI when ChatGPT launched nearly four years ago. Now that we’ve been living with AI weaving its way into the very fabric of our society, I’ve found a begrudging acceptance of its place in life. And its place in SEO content writing.
What nags at me now is how to keep the humanness in the content I’m producing. As I sheepishly type “How to Write with AI Without Sounding Like AI” into a search engine, I’m hit with the incredible irony of this situation.
The advice all points the same way. Never use an em dash. Avoid the rule of three. Don’t open on a negating statement. We’ve built a rulebook for not sounding like a machine, and following it has us all writing to dodge the same tells.
So trust your judgement over the machines’. If the em dash feels right, keep it. If the rule of three feels unnecessary, scrap it. Negating statements don’t need to be in every opening paragraph. Editing with your own perspective and emotional lens matters more than ever.
Whether you keep some AI-isms or strip them out, the fact that you decided is what makes it human.
Dig into why punctuation isn’t the real AI tell, on Medium (account required) →
// Ivana Erceg, Content Strategist
What Fremantle’s Season Says About Your Marketing Mix
Ask a Dockers fan about patience and you’ll get thirty years of material. What’s different this season is the depth.
Josh Treacy, Luke Jackson, Caleb Serong, Alex Pearce, Shai Bolton, Murphy Reid — the list keeps going. Fremantle haven’t produced a miracle every week. They’ve been consistently good because no one player has had to carry them, and a club-record 13 straight wins after that Round 1 loss to Geelong is what depth looks like on a ladder.
Marketing mixes are no different. SEO, Google Ads, Meta, email and content each play a different role, and the campaigns that hold up are the ones where nothing is doing all the heavy lifting. If a single channel is carrying your results, give it the heave-ho and diversify, because the week it stops working you’ve got nothing behind it.
Depth is also what lets you hold your nerve. Justin Longmuir doesn’t tear up the game plan after one loss, and good marketing teams don’t overreact to one underperforming campaign. You make data-driven adjustments and leave the structure alone.
Whether Freo lift the cup this year or not, they’ve built something that gives them a shot for years. Getting your marketing right works the same way. It’s never about winning just the month.
On that note, September’s nearly here. It’s Wharfie Time.
// Matthew Dower, Performance Media Executive
The Best Time to Start Was Twenty Years Ago. The Second Best Time Was Saturday.
Somewhere in life you start believing there are things you’re too old to begin. No one says it outright, but it’s understood: the new sport, the new hobby, the skill everyone else picked up years ago.
When I started cycling seriously, I felt like an imposter. Everyone spoke a language of cadence, power and drafting, knew which wheels to buy and how to fuel for a long ride, and made clipping into their pedals look effortless. I knew almost none of it. Most of the group rides were dominated by men, and it would have been easy to decide I didn’t belong.
What I found was a community generous with what it knew. Every ride taught me something, even if it was only that everyone has days they wonder why they signed up.
Then I crashed and broke several fingers. The advice was kind: maybe it’s time to stop. But all I thought about through the recovery was getting back out there.
The recovering fingers weren’t the hard part. It was the fear of starting something new. We stop trying new things because we’re afraid of looking inexperienced or of getting it wrong, and we let ourselves believe this stage of life is only for maintaining. I don’t anymore. Becoming a beginner again has been the best proof I have that there’s still plenty ahead.
Meet the Saturday group Andrea rides with at Midland Cycle Club →
// Andrea Ivins, Finance Assistant
Bonfire is an award-winning performance marketing agency based in Subiaco, Western Australia and South Yarra, Victoria.
Read every issue of the newsletter on LinkedIn.