In 2016, the full senior leadership of Akagi Nyugo lined up shoulder to shoulder outside their own headquarters and, in national television commercial to a mournful little country guitar line, took a bow. The full, from-the-waist, we deeply apologise bow. What had they done to warrant it? They’d put up the price of an icy pole. Bastards.

The internet has measured time in Grand Theft Auto VI time (which we’ll refer to as GTA 6 from now on) for over a decade. We got a pandemic before GTA 6. We got the Oasis reunion before GTA 6. Kids born the week the last Grand Theft Auto came out are now in high school. Games marketing also does something most industries would treat as a leak: it sells the making-of as the product.

Neil asked Sam the other day whether we’re supposed to be keeping receipts. There was a pause – the long kind – where five people who run a communications consultancy work out that yes, obviously. And no. We haven’t been. End of financial year does that to you. Everyone is reconciling and lodging and proving the year happened the way they said it did. Clearly we hate that prospect so instead we’re looking back to fondly reconcile our COMMPRESS issues rather than accounts. As it happens, we’ve noticed we’ve been having the same discussion all year.

Turns out we have a type.

When we sat down to plan this issue, Neil asked the obvious question we figure a lot of people are asking about Backrooms: a movie with a $US10 million budget just out-opened Avatar, so how did they flog it? The question assumes the movie came out of nowhere, which for a lot of people appears to be the case. But it came out of somewhere extremely specific, and the selling started seven years before this thing roared into cinemas and mainstream culture.

The Knicks are champions, their first title since 1973. They took the Spurs 4–1, in a series that produced the largest comeback in the history of the NBA playoffs: down 29 at the half in Game 4 and won by a single point. How do you get New York – full of finance bros, Dominicans, Bushwick artists and Staten Island Italians, a city that prides itself on never agreeing on lunch – to move all at once, in the same direction, on a thing none of them were told to do?

Patagonia, the brand, is taking Pattie Gonia, the drag queen, to court.

So we split the office in two and made them argue about said drag queen, a $US1 lawsuit, and the most beloved purpose brand on the planet. Nobody changed their mind. Everybody had a wonderful time.

Pity the reader. The past fortnight in Canberra lit that principle up in capital letters: a senator parlayed a single sentence into national headlines while the Federal Government futzed about in an explanatory war over its own Budget, one it lost to AI memes of Albo.

That’s right, it’s COMMPRESS goes Canberra.

Whether what follows is a real read of where culture is sitting in May 2026 or one person doing pattern-matching with his 3pm coffee, we will leave to you. Here’s the longest, fastest-turned-around 2026 Met Gala interpretation you’re gonna get this side of a K-pop stan account that had every look screenshotted, tagged and provenance-checked before the after-parties opened… so strap yourself in, we reckon it’s worth it even if there is a stray typo or two. There won’t be.

If you’ve spent the past fortnight touching grass, a Brooklyn rock band called Geese – the ones with the bloke who sings like a stabbed Ian Brown, the ones every Substack you read spent 2025 nominating as the saviours of American indie rock – have been working with a digital marketing agency called Chaotic Good Projects.

We’ve been watching our socials melt this week and we’re pretty confident yours have too. Justin Bieber headlined Coachella, reportedly as the highest-paid headliner in the festival’s history, and spent a solid 25 minutes of his set sitting on a stool with a MacBook, pulling up his own YouTube videos and singing karaoke to them. The crowd watched what he was searching. Hundreds of thousands more — mostly on their own laptops — watched the crowd watching what he was searching. A guy on a computer, being watched by people on computers, while browsing the platform that made him famous as a child. The internet hasn’t shut up about it since. And, well, rightly so.

In the past 12 months, roughly every trade publication with an opinion on content has published a breathless piece about micro-dramas – vertically filmed, two-to-three-minute scripted episodes designed for your phone – and how they represent A New Paradigm In Brand Storytelling. We’ve read a lot of them. They are very, very earnest.

Issue 50! What a time to be alive. If anyone wants to file through our past issues and let us know how many shots we’ve taken at Brooklyn Beckham over the lifecycle of COMMPRESS, be our guest, we’ve got plenty of TV marketing goods sitting around the office to send your way. Otherwise we’d love to tell you we had a special issue planned for our golden anniversary but instead we’re just back to ranting about crisis management, as much as we know that’s exactly what most of you love to see.

Quick, without searching, what’s the name of the Reuters journalist who unmasked Banksy earlier this month?

We will save you the effort. Nobody knows. Much, we would wager, to said journalist’s chagrin. Especially because there were actually three of them, which says more than their 7,000-word tribute to their own ego ever could.

We normally talk about what sparks a smarter conversation but this morning we figured a deep dive on a single smart conversation was warranted. Cause damn. Harry Styles and Haruki Murakami? On the spring cover of Runner’s World?

If you happened to put a Polymarket bet on that one we assume you’re reading this from the Cayman Islands.

Just last month, a Substack called Citrini Research published what read like a leaked corporate memo from 2028. Titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis”, it painted a visceral picture: white-collar unemployment hitting 10.2%, the S&P 500 down 38% and a “deflationary spiral” triggered by AI-driven overcapacity. It was a pseudo-satirical essay exploring worst-case scenarios. The next day it triggered an actual market sell-off, with the Dow falling 822 points. Let’s be clear about this: unlike Welles in the 1930s, most of the audience knew this wasn’t real corporate intel, but it felt convincing enough in fragments that traders started hedging against the scenario it painted anyway.

In the cultural sense, AI (Claude and GPT in particular) has become an almost-physical thing, insofar that it now sits in your customer’s life, often many times every single day. They use it, they’re familiar with it, it forms part of the tapestry of their lives. It’s just like a toothbrush or, perhaps more relevant, it’s like Alexa on a kitchen bench in 2017.

Woosh. Following Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime show, New York City’s water system recorded a 295-million-gallon spike in toilet flushes. The Department of Environmental Protection posted the number – 761,719 toilets flushing across all five boroughs in the 15 minutes after he ended – and it went goddamn everywhere. A somewhat-known municipal utility became part of the Super Bowl conversation simply because it had the one data point nobody else could see.

If you haven’t yet heard about Moltbook, chances are you’re about to, whether you choose to continue reading here or not. You see Moltbook, created by OpenClaw, is the world’s first social media platform for AI agents. Now, the majority of discourse to date concerns whether these bots are, indeed, independently engaging in autonomous conversation. That, and whether or not we’re witnessing the beginning of the end for humankind as we know it, but the latter feels kind of… boring?

This one is shockingly straightforward by our standards. Here’s a list of the very specific things that had the SKMG team in a vice grip across the year. Think of it less like a best of list and more like an esoteric library of hyperfixation.

Music marketing right now is famously hard. Over 100,000 tracks are uploaded to Spotify daily while artists duke it out on TikTok for a viable slice of the algorithm, and all the while, Alan Jackson’s Chattahoochee still doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.

But in the face of adversity comes innovation. And although not easy, there are some stellar examples from 2025 of artists sparking the smartest conversations with their fans. When you can’t rely on radio gatekeepers or MTV rotation, you figure out how to build IP universes, turn products into living documents, and make distribution mechanisms out of your own fans.