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.

PowerPoint is bigger than Jesus.

Not so much in the Lennon way, but we’d say its measurable impact on human cognitive processing and culture is pretty much the same. While we’ve been busy panicking about AI reshaping how we think, we missed the fact that a piece of 1980s presentation software had already done the job. Thirty-five million PowerPoints are given daily. That’s 400 presentations per second, each one reinforcing a cognitive framework so embedded in our collective psyche that we don’t even see it anymore. Fuck Freud, the superego has become a slide deck.

You already knew this, but Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral election last week. He beat former Governor Andrew Cuomo by nine points and became the city’s first Muslim mayor, first South Asian mayor and the youngest mayor in over a century. Voter turnout hit two million voters, the highest for a mayoral race in more than 50 years. Here’s how we reckon he did it.

“Any publicity is good publicity” might be the dumbest thing smart people say. We shoot it down constantly, but Astronomer – you know, that company whose CEO got caught hugging his HR director at a Coldplay concert in July – just gave us the perfect case study in why it’s bullshit.

Three months on from the biggest pop culture moment of the year for a B2B company (to be fair, there aren’t a lot of them, in any year), we need to ask: what did that spike actually give them?

Taylor Swift dropped her new album, The Life Of A Showgirl, at 2.00pm AEST on Friday and we’re refusing to call it a masterclass.

Look, we all know she’s built an empire. We all know she’s exceptional at what she does. But this isn’t another breathless dissection of her genius; you’ve read enough of those to last several lifetimes and honestly, we can’t tell you anything you don’t already know about why she’s successful.

Two different companies. Two different industries. One thing in common: a failure to understand the basic principles of good internal communication.

When ANZ inadvertently announced 3,500 job cuts plus 1,000 contractor terminations and when Paramount declared creative teams “must sit together” we were reminded that the line between internal and external comms dissolved somewhere around 2019. Always remember, every leaked memo can now become front page news.

“Do you know about apples?” Sam asked during our weekly planning session, completely derailing a conversation about fictional brand campaigns based on mushroom poisonings. What started as an offhand question about his discovery of Envy apples (“I fucking love them”) led us down a rabbit hole that blows the gaff on one of commerce’s most fundamental challenges.

Andrew here. This issue, or a version of it, is something I’ve been harassing the rest of the team to greenlight for at least a year now. It only took a global phenomenon for them to agree I might be onto something with this “Korea gets marketing” thing.

What follows is long, dense and at times frenetic. Try and do your best to keep up. Promise you’ll learn at least two things and have a new favourite song.

Telstra has just dropped what the industry is calling “essentially a product demo, a very entertaining one” for its network security capabilities. But uh, forgive us, what was the product again? The 60-second spot features Steve Buscemi as an evil intergalactic emperor trying to unleash “scamageddon” on Australia, only to be repeatedly foiled by Telstra's mighty network. Not how or why mind you, just that it was.

Remember when horror was the genre you had to defend at dinner parties? The guilty pleasure you’d sheepishly admit to between your Criterion Collection name-drops? Well, horror has eaten 12.1% of the US box office pie so far in 2025 and suddenly everyone’s talking about elevated this and social thriller that, as if adding adjectives somehow makes the blood less bloody.