Like steam rising out of a manhole cover, your favourite conference special edition is back and it’s sweating.

We spent four beautiful fall days at Advertising Week New York and the Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Summit, bouncing between Penn Station and Times Square, mostly indoors. We didn’t send daily editions of COMMPRESS this time, unlike Cannes and Cairns, so you’re getting the lot in one diner-sized portion.

Climate Group CEO Helen Clarkson runs Climate Week NYC, which opened on Sunday alongside the UN General Assembly. Clarkson has one word on her mind, which, it may not surprise you to learn, is “climate”. The reason why, however, is substantially more compelling.

More than 70% of UK newspaper articles covering June’s record heatwave didn’t once mention climate change, she told Sustainability Magazine in the lead-up. “We’re watching the language disappear from the story, even as the story itself gets worse,” she said.

No searching, no scrolling back. What’s Apple’s new phone called? What colour is the other one? If you got both right, you probably work in marketing.

On Friday, Andrew Tindall, Chief Growth Officer at the ad effectiveness firm System1, shared a photo of a poster at Oxford Circus that no one had paid for: the masthead of The Economist with a fold running clean down the middle and four words underneath it: “Foldable since 1843”.

Picking a Met Gala theme means asking a few hundred extremely rich and often famous people to put their name on it rather publicly every first Monday in May. Seats go for $US100,000 but corporate tables go for a shade north of that ($US350,000!?) which is, of course, chump change for the likes of Amazon, Meta, OpenAI and Snap, who all pay to be part of the event. This year’s Met Gala raised $US42 million, used to fund the only department at the Met that has to fund itself, the Costume Institute.

There is one funeral guest list in America that Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Beyoncé, both of Tennessee’s senators, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Mick Jagger, Kacey Musgraves, Eminem, Flavor Flav, the Mayor of New York and the Muppets will all sign. On Tuesday, sadly, we learned that book is for Dolly Parton.

He smokes ciggies in the stairwell and comes back in smelling like a bus shelter. He’s at war with the head of HR, who has form for setting things alight. He’s supposed to be the one who writes the code, although you’d never know it to watch him. Management has him down, in writing, as a bad culture fit. His name is Ling Long. He’s an engineer at a New York AI startup, and nobody on its payroll is him.

In early July, Anthony Albanese was asked on a podcast to name the strangest gift he’d been given as Prime Minister. He said a melon. Innocuous enough. In May, Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi brought him a crown melon: hand-wrapped, grown one to a vine, about $270, and in Japan a considered act of respect. He said it was a strange gift – to the uninitiated – but it turned out to be quite good.

If he’d stopped there, we still might be struggling to think of what to talk about this week. Fortunate for us, and deeply unfortunate for the office of the PM, he kept going.

We’ve been looking for an excuse to write about BTS since Issue 35 and then the Grammys handed one over on a silver platter.

On 16 June, the Academy announced five new categories and let the Asian music industry learn about Best Asian Pop Music Performance at the same time as everyone else. K-pop fandom spent the next six weeks calling it a consolation prize. Then last week, all seven members of BTS said they won’t be entering next year’s Grammy Awards, posting the same few lines to their own accounts.

Shay Mitchell would like you to know that her best-selling bag will, carried on its own, rip your shoulder to shreds. She read that review out herself in an ad for her brand Béis: “Lol the Weekender is indeed going to rip your shoulder to shreds if carried by itself.” Then she redesigned nine of the products around what customers had complained about and built the campaign out of the complaints. “I’m literally building it with you,” she told The Business of Fashion. “Tell me what you would like to see improve.”

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.