Nathan Rathsam is a cinematographer, first and foremost, and someone who’s work is very wrapped up in the world of music. Most recently he’s been spending his time covering local acts including dust and The Belair Lip Bombs.

He is someone who needs to hear a song more than once to be able to know what to do with it, so he’ll rinse a track over and over until an idea turns up… which can take up a lot of his day.

How he spends the rest of it, however, is less romantic. Podcasts in the car, six coffees by mid-afternoon and, well, the Cat in the Hat movie?

He’d also rather gatekeep his screen time (shame) but you gotta respect it.

Let’s tune on in.

Wake up

Wake-up time entirely depends on the day. If I have a shoot, am going interstate or on tour, I could be waking up as early as 3.30am; if it’s just an edit day, it could be as late as 10am. Unfortunately, I do reach for my phone first thing in the morning (a habit I’m trying to quit): a quick morning doomscroll before getting out of bed and going about my day.

Morning

Mornings always start with a coffee, whether making one at home or on my way to set. I’m not really a breakfast person unless I’m on a shoot that day, in which case I’ll grab a B&E from up the road.

What I listen to can vary pretty broadly; most days, the Aunty Donna podcast is in my ears or in my car on the way to work. If not Aunty Donna, then it will be a new album or single mixes from an artist I’m working with. I find it’s very, very rare for me to come up with an idea for someone on first listen to their song, so I tend to rinse it over and over and over until something hits. Apart from that, my music taste revolves around local artists 90% of the time. Currently, I’m a huge fan of the new Swapmeet album, Mount Zero, and Horse’s debut EP Ask Me Again Next Year.

If I have a shoot, then a local artist will be soundtracking my drive, probably working with another local artist. If it’s an edit day, then I’ll be downstairs, laptop open, ready to get stuck into whatever I need to do for the day.

Afternoon

At this point in the day, I’m either most of the way through a shoot day, feeling a bit drowsy from a heavy lunch, and six or so coffees in or at home waist-deep in editing, writing treatments or sending emails. All this happens with either the Wanderingdp or Frame Set podcasts, or sometimes even the Cat in the Hat movie on the TV. I can explain the Wanderingdp and Frame Set podcasts directly as “passive learning”; the Cat in the Hat movie, I don’t really have an answer for.

At any point, my tabs will, at the very least, have both my emails open, two or three Dropbox tabs, and a Milanote tab open all at once while I wonder why my computer is slowing down while I try to edit (the answer was right in front of me all along).

Evening

If I’m being good, by about 5.30pm I’ve finished everything I need to do that day; if it’s one of those weeks, then I’m still on my laptop staring at a blank treatment deck or an editing timeline. There are some nights where I feel particularly inspired and am working on something by choice, but if I can, I’ll try to wrap up everything so I feel like I’ve had a “regular” workday.

If all goes to plan, I’ll go to the gym for about an hour to get some sort of physical activity into my day and undo all those hours of sitting hunched over like a prawn.
Some nights I’ll either be still on set, just starting a shoot or just wrapping up and either going out for dinner with the crew or coming home.

At this point, if I’m at home, I’m thinking about cooking dinner. I have the privilege of living right next to a grocer/butcher, so I can just pop out and buy things as needed. How complicated the meal I make entirely depends on whether I started thinking about what to make earlier in the day or just as dinner rolls around.

Nathan Rathsam’s Picks & Recs

SCREEN TIME: I’d rather gatekeep this

SUBSCRIBED TO: The Exploring Series

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO READ: Susan Sontag’s On Photography

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO: Swapmeet’s Mount Zero album

AN UNEXPECTED GOOGLE SEARCH: “Laundry machine barrel”

A LINK WORTH FORWARDING:

INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT I’M LOVING RIGHT NOW: @nowness

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.

Trump got his tribute to Dolly out in 37 minutes, ordering flags in the US to be lowered to half-staff for a week. George W. Bush, Obama and Bill Clinton took a little longer and said similar things about the death of one of the world’s most treasured artists. Their tributes joined thousands and thousands and thousands of others. GQ summed up what a lot of people were thinking: “Good golly, this one hurts”. (OK, not many of us say “Good golly”, but you get our drift.)

Not one of the tributes needed a risk assessment first. No comms person sat on a draft for an hour working out whether their boss could afford to be seen mourning this particular woman. Trump will argue with Obama about the weather if you let him – or, say, a place of birth – but both celebrated Dolly without hesitation.

As Neil reached for his first edition Dolly Parton scrapbook in mourning, the office discussion focused on the Titanic career of an international treasure. Everyone loved her. She was in and out of our lives for almost six decades. She was only ever herself and she never pretended to be anything else, even if the colour of her hair (and wigs) was not the one she was born with.

Dolly Parton was the most carefully constructed public figure in American music. The wigs were a system, just as the nails were. In her later years, she wore a fitted covering over the backs of her hands, because surgery can do a great deal for a face and nothing whatsoever for hands. She told Adam Grant in 2022 that the advice she’d been given for years was to go simpler, to stop looking so cheap, since no one was ever going to take her seriously in that get-up. She kept the get-up and built a $US450 million business behind it. Her own line to ELLE in 2019: “I look totally artificial, but I am totally real, as a writer, as a professional, as a human being.” The title track of her 2008 album Backwoods Barbie told the same story:

Martha Ackmann, whose biography Ain’t Nobody’s Fool landed just before Christmas, describes what was going on: “Looking one way and being another gives [Dolly] something to play off, that people expect her to be a kind of buffoon, to be a fool in the way she looks, until they hear her sing, until they hear her songs.” What you’re looking at here, is a perfectly executed long-term commitment to the bit, under the acknowledgement that the product – the Act pillar – spans generations.

In March a University of Massachusetts Lowell poll put Dolly on a net favourability of +65. Obama came in at +14, Taylor Swift at +3, Trump at -18. No politician has been within sight of a number like that in a generation. The poll confirmed what every Dolly fan always knew: she was the most loved person in America.

Yes, she was authentic. She was resilient. She always made fun of herself. She worked hard, so hard. What Dolly also did, with more discipline than very possibly any brand we know of, was refuse to be useful to any external agenda.

She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom three times: twice from the Trump administration and once from Biden’s. The refusal she gave Biden came with the only sentence you need: “I just don’t want even the appearance of being partisan in any way.” Years earlier, to ABC, she said: “I learned a long time ago, keep your damn mouth shut if you want to stay in show business.”

Dolly wrote her own brand safety policy and enforced for six decades against enormous pressure to pick a side. Every president who wanted a photo with her got a polite “No” and every cause that wanted her on a poster got a cheque instead.

She famously said “No” when Elvis Presley’s management asked to record I Will Always Love You in 1974. Why? Because Elvis insisted on getting a cut of publishing royalties on any song he recorded. The fact I Will Always Love You was a very, very small hit at the time – and Elvis was a big, big star – didn’t sway her. Dolly had known for years the power of holding on to publishing rights. (Of course, 19 years later, Dolly said OK to Whitney Houston, whose version of I Will Always Love You sold more than 20 million copies.)

Anyone who wanted a duet, though, they got one. Scroll her own collaborations playlist and you will find Rob Halford of Judas Priest a few tracks from an obscure Christian singer, Beyoncé and Dolly singing Tyrant a few tracks from Sabrina Carpenter, who rewrote the chorus of Please Please Please to strip the swearing out of it because Dolly gave her the rules first: “I don’t cuss. I don’t make fun of Jesus. I don’t talk bad about God, and I don’t say dirty words on camera.” She wrote Eminem a letter in 2022 after they were both inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, telling him she’d always felt some unexplained connection to him, but the two of them never met in their lives. He posted the letter on Tuesday.

The list of Dolly collaborators says a lot about how she kept her brand moving forward and interesting. She joined forces with many, many, many country singers – Porter Wagoner, Kenny Rogers, Lainey Wilson, Glen Campbell, Chet Atkins, Reba McEntire, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Willie Nelson, Vince Gill, et al – and a lot of barely known acts (Demaree, Of King And Country, Belles). There were myriad unexpected collaborations: Queen Latifah, Gloria Estefan, Neil Diamond, Julio Iglesias, Sia, Smokey Robinson, Norah Jones, Mavis Staples. And some really unexpected ones – Culture Club, The Wiggles, Galantis, Joan Jett, Rob Halford, Steven Tyler. (Dolly performed several times with Patti Labelle, but it was never captured on record, which is a crying shame.)

The constant duets weren’t a case of slapping a new pack design on an old product and hoping it fools some people. They were true to the Dolly brand, often engaging and often showed a different side to her music. OK. There is one howler of an exception: the songs she did with Sylvester Stallone for their movie Rhinestone. Not good, as everyone, including Dolly, acknowledged. But Sly did give one of the most hilarious tributes to Dolly this week.

We’ve strayed a bit. Back to Dolly’s silence on some things. Silence on its own gets you nowhere, of course. Plenty of celebrities keep their mouths shut for 60 years and no one lowers a flag when they go. What made the refusal work was the sheer weight of what she stacked up on the other side of it.

The Imagination Library has posted 304,539,509 books to children since 1995. In 2025 alone it sent 40,356,668 of them, which works out at one book leaving the building every 0.78 seconds. It runs in five countries, including here since 2013. She built it because her father couldn’t read: “Daddy couldn’t read and write, and it was kind of crippling to him.”

In 2020 she gave $US1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for coronavirus research, and the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund is credited in the footnotes of the New England Journal of Medicine paper announcing the Moderna vaccine results. She spent the following year telling interviewers she’d been given more credit for that than she deserved.

Speed was the thing she was frighteningly good at. Her relief fund for the Gatlinburg fires that took hold in November 2016 was taking applications within six hours and paying $US1,000 a month to 921 households while most organisations would still have been briefing an agency. It ran for six months, bumped the final payment to $US5,000 because the donations kept arriving, and got through about $US12.5 million. Dolly never once went on television to talk about it.

The Buddy Program paired up Sevier County seventh and eighth graders in 1990 and gave each pair $US500 if they both finished school. The county dropout rate fell from 35 per cent to six. (Thanks to Billboard, here is a timeline of Dolly’s biggest philanthropic efforts.)

The sweetest version of these stories has a nice lady from Little Pigeon River in Tennessee giving everything away, but that would be an equally naive interpretation of what’s really going on here.

Turning down Elvis was one of the single most valuable things she ever did in an afternoon. And Elvis and his people shouldn’t have been surprised. Dolly started her first business venture, OwePar Publishing Co., at 21 years old in partnership with her uncles Bill and Louis Owens. Its main assets were her lyrics and music. At the time it was far more common for record labels to own an artist’s masters. Dolly and her uncles maintained ownership of her catalogue from the start of her career. (FYI, Dolly earned about $US20 million from Whitney’s cover of I Will Always Love You. She didn’t care that Whitney got a massive #1 hit and the credit: “She can have the credit. I’ll just take the cash.”)

Dolly wrote about 3,000 songs and tucked them into her catalogue. Unlike many artists in recent years, she didn’t sell the catalogue. Last year, Forbes estimated it was worth $US120 million. Right now, that feels like a very conservative estimate.

Dolly owned half of Dollywood, which generates $US1.8 billion a year in direct economic impact for Sevier County and supports more than 23,000 regional jobs. She’d flog nearly anything with her name on it: cake mix to Duncan Hines, doughnuts to Krispy Kreme, her name to a pinot noir, a range of rhinestone dog harnesses called Doggy Parton, and a whole musical about the Taco Bell Mexican Pizza that she released on TikTok. Her line on the 60 Minutes couch in 2009 still gets quoted in business schools:

Any of that should have cost her… something. We’ve written enough issues about brands getting torched for a fraction of it. Not Dolly. When she renamed the Dixie Stampede in 2018 she told Billboard: “When they said ‘Dixie’ was an offensive word, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to offend anybody. This is a business. We’ll just call it The Stampede. As soon as you realise that something is a problem, you should fix it.” She fixed it, said so once, and went back to work.

Let’s not forget Dolly’s SongTeller Hotel in Nashville, a soon-to-be-opened 200,000 square feet tribute to her music, fashion and family, in hotel form. “This is not something that was done yesterday,” Middle Tennessee State University marketing and personal branding professor Don Roy told Sportsbookwire. “This is the culmination of decades of forging a favourable brand image and being philanthropic.”

Like any brand, Dolly didn’t always win. Missouri, the first state in the US to fund the Imagination Library in full, spent the seven weeks before she died freezing new enrolments in it after the legislature cut the appropriation from about $US6 million to $US2 million, with roughly 170,000 kids on the list and the Governor’s office pointing at a budget imbalance and tough decisions. Two other states had already made the same call: Washington zeroed a $US7 million request in April 2025 with 121,000 children enrolled there, about one in four of its under-fives, and Indiana scrapped its 50% match the same year, handing the problem to the First Lady’s private fundraising.

Dolly’s money was never the thing that ran out. The Dollywood Foundation pays for the book selection, the publisher deals, the database, the fulfilment. Local partners cover the books and the postage at about $US2.60 per child per month, usually split down the middle with a state match. Pull the match and the books stop. But the most popular person in America – with all that brand equity – still could not hold a $US4 million line item in a state’s budget.

Many in this industry run on a promise that this scenario should have played out different: make people love a brand enough and that love converts into something, be it pricing power, patience through a crisis, permission to move, or a hearing when it counts. We sell affection as a currency you get to spend later. Dolly held more of it than any living person – and that influence certainly applied to direct sales of her music and merchandise – but outside of that it did not shift one line in a budget she deeply cared to influence.

Dolly seems to have understood this better than anyone else. Everything she wanted to happen, she paid for herself, or she took $US100 million from Jeff Bezos and paid for it with that. She built her own foundation, her own theme park, her own label and her own publishing company.

It’s a good lesson for anyone whose job is building brands and reputations, because it makes goodwill a form of insulation rather than leverage. It keeps people off your back while you go and make something happen for yourself, but all the love in the world won’t necessarily make it happen for you.

Many brands tend to run the Act, Explain, Amplify weighting opposite to Dolly: a thin act, a heavy explain and a paid amplify; then they wonder why the affection they bought doesn’t buy anything back. Stop treating brand love as a balance you will draw down in the bad quarter. Work out what you would still do if it were worth exactly nothing, then go and do that, on your own coin before anyone thinks to ask you for it.

What we’re obsessed with this week

Andrew

Honestly the only thing I’ve had time to be obsessed with this week has been ARIA’s announcement that it’s updating the Chart code to exclude AI-generated music.

Don’t get me wrong, ARIA is one of the first industry bodies around the world to make such an announcement and it’s a fantastic story, but even working this close to it, I’m frankly blown away by just how broad it’s gone. Seriously, we’re way past the SKMG record for countries covering a story. It’s hit The New York Times, BBC, South China Morning Post and publications in Korea, Japan, Italy, Germany, Canada, Manilla, India, Ireland and probably more I have no idea about (yet). I don’t mean as a humble brag as much as I mean to point to it as an indicator of how borderless the interest in AI and creativity currently is. If there was ever any doubt that people the world over gave a shit about protecting human artistry, the pick up on this news surely nerfs it.

Neil

We talk a lot about authenticity here at SKMG. Authenticity in how a brand, person, company, narrative and message is created and delivered. If you’ve read this far, you will know authenticity was a key part of Dolly Parton’s enduring success. It also underpins a constant obsession of mine, something that’s often on my mind and not far from my reach. Laughing Cow cheese wedges. Born in France in 1921 and now global, they are a blend of cream, milk and fresh and aged cheeses. They’re not fine cheese, but they don’t pretend to be. They are consistent, convenient and well-priced, the McDonald’s or Coca-Cola of processed cheese. Forget your Babel Bels, your Tigers and your Kraft anything, Laughing Cow is the real deal.

Eliza

This year at All Points East, Zara Larsson stole the show for me, more specifically, her crowd. During Midnight Sun, fans started lifting each other to recreate Zara’s now-infamous dolphin pose. That bloody dolphin meme haunts my feed; honestly, though? I’m not mad at it, and I don’t think Zara is either. Once the queen of summer hits, Zara had a bit of a career wobble. Then came a viral TikTok trend that set her 2017 hit Symphony into orbit (again). With colourful dolphins and increasingly unhinged captions, the meme was so big it put the hit back at number one on the Billboard TikTok chart. Cue the rebrand: maximalist makeup, covered in glitter, ocean-inspired two-piece sets and Y2K spray-paint tanks. The flop era was over; the dolphin had spoken. It’s not the first time a pop star clawed its way out of the Khia Asylum via a full rebrand. Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, and Chappell Roan have all found their version of the escape route, building communities and fanbases around their new image. If only Jess Glynne had done the same with her Jet2 Holiday momentum.

Sam

The Beast in Me, of which my girlfriend and I have one measly episode left and which I am already mourning. Great psychological thriller. Love Claire Danes. Love Matthew Rhys. But the real obsession here is how important it is – and I cannot stress this enough, people – to have a show to watch with your partner. When you have a good show you’re into, you take it for granted, because everything is fine, isn’t it? Everything is smooth. You have something to look forward to. You have somewhere to be. You become a person who says “No, wait for me” about a television program and means it with his whole being.

And then it ends. That is the hollow bit. When you “have nothing to watch” together. Nobody warns you about the hollow bit. So, get a show. And stagger your finales.

Sophia Doak is a freelance photographer and her work is gorgeous. See for yourself.

Her MediaDiet tells us she’s also someone who solves things on foot. A day of editing leaves her brain foggy, so she walks it off, sometimes to jazz, sometimes to a playlist aptly named “Hot to Go”, and sometimes with the phone left at home on purpose. When a walk won’t do it, she and her housemate take the car out for laps of Bondi with the windows down, screaming the lyrics. She says it’s healing.

She also reads for an hour in bed every night before the light goes off, and is sitting on the best media hack we’ve come across in months (listed below) courtesy of her mum.

Let’s stretch the legs.

Wake up

I reach for my phone first thing for the sole purpose of turning off my alarm, which usually goes off around 6am in winter. Unsure if this counts as media consumption, but I do tend to have a little sneak peek at my notifications that have accumulated overnight during the Do Not Disturb phase.

Morning

Oh, I love mornings, especially living so close to the ocean. I get up, put a pot of coffee on and go for a walk. Usually I listen to music: lately, it’s been a personal playlist called “Hot to Go” consisting of hits from the likes of JLo, Rihanna, The Jonas Brothers etc. That, or I just love to walk to jazz. Sometimes I even leave my phone at home and move in silence, hah. If I wake up and decide I want a slow morning (which I really cherish) this usually means coffee and reading my book (currently East of Eden) in bed.

I am a freelance photographer but I also work retail, so if I am working, most mornings I want to be up early to do some work before heading into the store. This tends to look like emails, some editing, looking at Pinterest or models.com while I eat my breakfast. My mum recently got me into PressReader; if you have a library account you can log in with it and gain access to endless newspapers and magazines (Rolling Stone! Vogue! La Cucina Italiana!). I do dabble in this too.

Afternoon

My days are always quite different, which I really enjoy. But in the afternoons I tend to be either on set shooting, at the store or working from home – with of course some running around seeing friends, maybe getting some movement in, entering heaven (Harris Farms). Working from home, I am likely to have anywhere from four to 19 tabs open at once.

Evening

Because I spend a lot of time on screens during the day for work, I really crave reading or activities in the evening. Sometimes spending all that time online makes my brain feel foggy. I try to go for a walk, play catch up with my housemate, read my book (recently finished Lie With Me), cook dinner, and maybe we watch something, for example, I’m catching up on the Spider-Man films before seeing the latest one.

I try to do all these things before doing more photography work. Sometimes my housemate and I go for “therapy drives” where we boost tunes and zoom around Bondi screaming the lyrics with the windows down. Healing.

I usually get into bed around 9pm and read my book for at least an hour. My phone goes on Do Not Disturb and I try not to touch it from when the book comes out.

Sophia’s Picks & Recs

SCREEN TIME: 3 hours, 19 minutes (approx.)

SUBSCRIBED TO: Spotify, Carter’s Cooking Substack, The New York Times Games, AmiGo. Oh my gosh, I think that’s it? Surely I am forgetting something?

Carter’s Cooking

Recipes I like to cook for myself, my family and my friends.

By Carter Were

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO READ: Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO: Another Day in Paradise by Phil Collins… of which I have just rediscovered and have on repeat

AN UNEXPECTED GOOGLE SEARCH: “Do snails have teeth?” Stay curious, I guess?

A LINK WORTH FORWARDING: Loved this:

INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT I’M LOVING RIGHT NOW: @lostjcrew

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.

OpenAI is advertising for a Senior Webinar & Digital Events Strategist, posted at $US266,000 to $US295,000, in a B2B marketing team, at the company that says it’s building machine superintelligence. Marketing Brew put Open AI’s linear television spend at $US64.9 million for the first four months of this year, a shade under what it spent during all of 2025. Google splashed even more money around, parting with $US81.7 million for linear TV ads promoting its AI products from 1 January to 20 April 20 year. Boards signing enterprise licences are being sold a story in which AI eats the marketing department, by vendors who are out hiring marketers. Why are AI companies advertising? It has turned back into old-fashioned marketing.

A moat, if you’ve been spared the pitch decks, is whatever stops the next person doing what you do. In software it was almost always the build: coding hours, coding muscle, tech, six months of engineering nobody else could be bothered paying for. Intellectual property and systems were the other two things you pointed at when an investor asked what they were buying. A patent can now describe something a stranger approximates over an afternoon. The system is a set of instructions a model reverse-engineers off your own marketing site. Good luck explaining that to a board that just capitalised its R&D.

The serious counter-argument is still being made and it’s decent: domain expertise and proprietary workflow data hold up in ways code doesn’t, and the SaaS-is-dead crowd have never migrated a payroll system. Fine. Nobody is spending money defending workflow data. They’re spending it on webinars. The hiring tells you where the money went. Semrush read 8,000 US content marketing listings on Indeed in November: content producer up 1,261% on 2023, content marketing manager down 73%, head of content up 376%. It is a whole-of-market study rather than a tech one, so read it as a weather report, but the weather is unambiguous. On that reading the jobs that only describe the work are going, and the ones being created either make the distinctive thing or own it.

With code, intellectual property and systems gone, the only thing a competitor can’t approximate is the ground the rest of it stands on. Apple and Google have taken a cut of everything sold on a phone since 2008, and two years of Epic in the American courts and the Digital Markets Act in Europe have prised that open without stopping the cut being collected. Most AI products you have seen demoed are tenants on somebody else’s model, paying by the token, on terms the landlord can rewrite on a Tuesday. Moving a feature costs a fortnight. Moving off the rails costs the product and every integration built into it since 2023. Whether that wall holds or is simply the one nobody has got round to knocking over is the bet the whole category is making without saying so.

Everyone craps on about Liquid Death and we’re loath to bring it up. But they’re great. Water is to the drinks market what SaaS is to AI right now: nothing in the liquid to argue about, so the argument moves to the can. The Liquid Death Pit Diaper (if you’ve never heard of it, you really should click the link) is $US75 of quilted pleather and chains, made with Depend, the incontinence people, so you can piss in the mosh pit without losing your spot. It sold out. Nothing about that product is the product. If everyone can build the SaaS, everyone can drink water.

Back to the stairwell. Ling Long works, after a fashion, for Cluely, a New York company whose software sits on your screen during a meeting and tells you what to say next. Ling Long is played by Remy Zhang, a comedian whose 2023 sketch about a Chinese exchange student had 40 million views and who is now Cluely’s Creative Director. The Instagram account, which features a scripted office sitcom the company writes and shoots about itself, has just under 475,000 followers. In a lot of episodes, somebody arrives in real time… holy schnitzels, we’re only just realising this is a real business. We followed the fake engineer for months without twigging he had an employer, which is either embarrassing or the entire point. Try buying that audience off them.

Cluely spent company money building an audience outside every normal avenue of marketing, then treated the audience itself as the asset. Then they hired the creator. An on-staff creator to build a moat is inspired: a performer with a name, a title and a desk, where rented ones take the audience home when the campaign ends. Cluely co-founder and CEO, Roy Lee, has since posted a video explaining how he met Zhang: he had gone looking for a creator to put on the payroll full time, and Zhang turned up with a character and an audience already attached.

There’s a second advantage nobody costs in. Platforms police an advertisement far harder than they police a joke, so the sketch travels on everyone else’s terms while the ad has to be bought. Run real ads later at your addressable market and you’re paying to convert people who already know the cast.

The Cluely Insta page also runs straight product skits and paid ads, so the easy version of this story (in which they never mention what they sell) is wrong. The heaviest sketches even carry a written-and-directed-by credit in Zhang’s own handle, which costs them nothing and buys the right to keep going. Whether any of it converts we couldn’t tell you, and neither could they without opening the books.

The audience is young and what’s being sold to them is ambition. Cluely’s brand identity is graduates rolling the dice: start with the soul, end with the sell, so people buy into the story long before they give a shit about the app. Dr Marcus Collins, who by now has a standing invoice with us, says people congregate around shared beliefs and the product is just the totem, which is why the pub with the terrible beer is always full. The Cluely app makes the same offer the persona does: sit in a meeting you’re not qualified for and something feeds you the line. If you’re not an expert yet, you don’t have to be. That’s the only reason the farce holds.

None of which is new, exactly. KFC ran a full-page FCK apology in February 2018 when it ran out of chicken, Dumb Ways to Die barely mentioned Metro Trains Melbourne and Heineken did it for decades with a pack shot at the end. What’s new is the combination: a product anyone can copy, a joke that never stops running, and a cast the company owns outright.

Build the brand on real people and you get the real people. Lee’s feed runs juvenile rage bait alongside the show, mostly telling anyone over 25 without a startup they’ve left it too late. On a Disrupt stage he said reputation is “sort of a thing of the past” and his voice is “naturally just very enraging to a lot of people”, which is his way of saying it isn’t deliberate. He also told Inc he’s “particularly good at framing myself in a way that’s controversial”. Pick one. The same feed argues, increasingly seriously, that brand and marketing are what defend a software company now.

Lee lost a Harvard offer for sneaking off a school trip, then used his own Interview Coder in his Amazon interview and lost that offer too (yep, the interview-cheating tool, used in an interview). Columbia University put him through its disciplinary process over the same tool, suspended him for a year, and he dropped out. In March he told TechCrunch he’d fabricated the $US7 million annual recurring revenue figure he gave them the previous summer, saying it was “the only blatantly dishonest thing I’ve said publicly online, so this is my formal retraction”. In any other business, a confession like that could be fatal. But not for Cluely.

There’s a painful arrogance to a lot of what Cluely is doing and much of it is disingenuous. They act like children, in the comedy of the videos and in Lee’s forward-facing comms. But you can’t deny these kids have a community, and are hacking at the walls of conventional conversations left, right and centre.

Bounty, the app Lee is spruiking now, pays people to open fresh accounts and make content from scripts built out of already-viral formats, then rents those pages to brands. Our read, which to be fair we can’t prove: Cluely is a content-marketing engine wearing an app, built to replace the startup incubator, which would explain why Lee won’t stop telling every young man online to start one. Whether yours works is beside the point so long as you’re posting on his rails.

Lee’s first product didn’t work well enough either: late last year, he told the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 gathering that Cluely probably launched too soon, deliberately. “The whole idea [was] let’s launch something that barely works, and if we can get enough initial users, they will find out the use cases for us,” he said. In other words, narrow the product, keep the crowd.

You’d think a frontier AI product was defensible. Chinese rivals are undercutting Anthropic on price, and consumers flick between Claude, Gemini and Perplexity on zeitgeist, on word of mouth, on a stranger’s LinkedIn post about which one writes better. A company founded on making AI safer now runs that mission as its point of difference, which is the job the comedy sketch is doing. At that altitude you’re splitting hairs between four things that do roughly the same job, so it comes down to the brand, the feel and the look.

Not every business can do this and most shouldn’t try. If every company starts running a surrealist send-up of itself it gets boring real fast. Cluely has already filmed themselves leaping out of a spa when the app went down, which was funny. Now try it with a breach, a lawsuit, a reporter with the receipts, the sort of week we’ve spent two issues on this year, one silent and one very loud.

Whatever it is you sell, it’s water now. The only thing left to choose between is the can, and there’s nothing on yours but your name.

What we’re obsessed with this week

Neil

This is more of a fascination than an obsession: Jennifer Coolidge flogging Audible. The audio book company and its creative agency Hello recently brought the American actor to Sydney, where she was “spotted” walking around Bondi with a bright orange trolley, headphones on and lost in an Audible audiobook. It appeared to be an expensive PR stunt. But no, it’s the start of broader campaign. The PR stunt went viral, but let’s be honest: 99% of PR stunts are sugar hits, peddled by PR people who don’t have a strategic bone in their body and just want to grab the money and run. The Audible campaign is different, which is a relief. Coolidge is great talent and this is going to make at least one consumer (me) remember the Audible brand.

Sam

49 Winchester. Six nice dudes from Castlewood, Virginia (population 2,045), who named the band after the street they formed on (classic). Isaac Gibson wrote his early songs while working as a stone mason and still sings like it.

Their sixth album, Change of Plans, came out in May. Dave Cobb produced it at his Savannah studio, the same man behind Chris Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson. The first thing they put out on the new label was a cover of Black Sabbath’s Changes, which Gibson manages to sing slower and sadder than Ozzy ever did. Start with Fortune Favors the Bold, the record that got them signed, and work forward. If you’ve only got four minutes, Russell County Line is an all-time fave.

Andrew

American DJ and producer Flying Lotus recently told Derrick Gee he was “yet to have the Beatles moment that is promised to every musician”. For the past month, I think I’ve finally had mine. Don’t get me wrong, I poured over the Beatles anthologies as a music history obsessed teen and wrote a book review on the McCartney bio in year 11. I always liked them (especially George). But only in the past month have I found myself rushing home to work out what the hell Lennon was up to with his modal interchanges and wracking my brain over the fact that bearded Paul on that rooftop in Saville Row was only 26 years old (!?). All of this is to say, last night I watched Help in stunning technicolour and have become obsessed with the concept of the musician movie. Specifically, the fact the US had Elvis out there falling in love on a beach in Hawaii (boring), while my man Ringo is fighting a tiger cub in the basement of a British pub (legend). We talk about poptimism in the modern age but I’m yet to see BTS throw together a surrealist fictional comedy to plug an album four months before following up with Rubber Soul. This was peak brand building that all the earnest band docos in the world couldn’t contend with. Prince got what I’m on about. Of course he did.

Eliza

Three years after seemingly coming to an end, Ted Lasso is back on Apple TV+ for a fourth season, this time shifting its focus to women’s football. Three episodes in, I’m obsessed and I don’t want it to end. I was a bit caught off guard when it popped up on Apple TV+ this past weekend. Season four has been met with somewhat muted excitement, with critics largely describing the return as comforting and familiar rather than fresh, or even necessary. I beg to differ on people’s points on “fresh” or “necessary”. I’m happy to see a popular series put women’s sport at the centre of the story, especially because it makes sense to. If this season brings more eyes to the game, that feels like a win.

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.

The host, comedian Nikki Osborne saw blood in the water and took her opportunity: “How did she get them through customs?”, “Did she just come in looking like Pamela Anderson?”, Osborn posited. The Prime Minister of Australia went along with her. “She brought two,” he said, hands somewhere around his chest. “And they were beautiful.”

Six seconds was all it took (well, if you don’t count the separate Kylie Minogue gaff). A bloke on a comedy podcast trying to keep up with a comedian and misjudging it. Naff, in the precise Australian sense: not sinister or a scandal, just a bit off. It’s the kind of thing you wince at when your uncle says it.

You can see the poor media person’s half-baked plan behind the booking: it’s a turbulent time for Albo in the court of public opinion, so let’s get him on a comedy podcast, loosen the tie, let him be a bit of a larrikin and remind everyone of the good ol’ Hawkey Labor days.

The place was Perth, 1983. Bob Hawke was soaked in champagne, resplendent in an America’s Cup jacket, declaring that any boss who sacked a worker for not turning up that day was a bum. Glorious. The country cracked a tinnie with him; after all, the man loved a drink. Everyone suspected he was a philanderer, and when that turned out to be true it made Hazel Hawke a household saint and sold a great many copies of Blanche d’Alpuget’s books. None of it dented The Silver Bodgie. The electorate had bought that exact bloke on purpose: larrikin outside, ferocious intellect underneath. When Hawke did something Hawke-ish the nation (most of it anyway) was enraptured.

Sure, it was a very different time, but that goodwill bank took 30 years to build. You cannot rent it for an afternoon on a podcast. Albanese went looking for it in somebody else’s format and found out, live, that he doesn’t have it.

More to our point, all this would still be a nothing story if he’d simply said so. One line, the next morning: that was a naff thing to say, apologies to Prime Minister Takaichi, moving on. Cost? An uncomfortable afternoon and a paragraph on page two.

Instead, in July, Japan’s embassy wrote to Canberra about the whole business: “sensationalised reporting in the Australian media”, no “ill intention”, no action to be taken. Takaichi separately wrote thanking Australia for its friendship after the recent earthquake. Tokyo wanted it gone, on the sound reasoning that anything Japan said out loud would only feed it here. And there it sat, until this week, when that correspondence turned up in The Australian and on 7NEWS, and then spread like wildfire.

Since then the Prime Minister has told Question Time “I reject the assertion in the question”. His office has put out that the claim that he mimicked Takaichi’s body is “incorrect”. Penny Wong has explained he didn’t mean the comments to be taken the way they’ve been taken. The Coalition has referred the leak to the Australian Federal Police. Michaelia Cash and Clare O’Neil have fought over whether that’s a fair use of police time, Tony Abbott has called it “unbelievably crass”, and Pauline Hanson of all bloody people has been afforded a chance to take the moral high ground by demanding the transcript be tabled.

An ally’s private correspondence is on the front page, somebody in Canberra is now potentially a person of interest and a good chunk of a sitting week of Federal Parliament has gone on a hand gesture. All because a PM didn’t quite have the judgement in the moment to shut down a reference to breasts for the risk of looking a little bit like a neg, and then doubly down by refusing to acknowledge it was in poor taste.

As the Financial Review’s Ronald Mizen pointed out this morning, Albo had a few wins this week including revealing a $2.5 billion bailout package for the Tomago aluminium smelter in NSW, striking a deal with the Coalition to get his News Bargaining Incentive legislation passed, and getting closer to a deal to revive his stalled gambling ads legislation. But all that has been completely overshadowed by a melon.

The melons saga has now sucked in the Foreign Minister, the PM’s office, the Parliament, the AFP and the private mail of a foreign government - and it could be hosed down with two words: “I apologise”. Each thing Albo throws at the fire to smother it turns into fuel.

And the note from Tokyo didn’t even do the job it was leaked to do. It would be crushing evidence, if Japan had been the one asking. Nobody in Penrith was up at 3.00am worrying about foreign policy. The question being asked at home was smaller and much harder to answer: what’s our Prime Minister like when he thinks he’s among mates?

None of this started with a melon, not really. Last year Albo and his partner Jodie Haydon bought a $4.3 million cliff-top place at Copacabana on the NSW Central Coast – four bedrooms, ocean views, cathedral ceilings – in the middle of a housing affordability crisis his own government keeps promising to fix. Yes, he’s entitled to buy a house, but he’s also the bloke asking a generation of renters to hang in there, while dropping lines like “We’re trying to help Australians buy their first home not their third or fourth”.

The Copacabana house storm ran hot for a fortnight and then left the news cycle. Ask around now and people will swear they’ve forgotten it. They haven’t. They’ve filed it.

Earlier this year Albo was asked to sum up Grace Tame in one word and he went with “difficult”. Tame, child sexual abuse survivor, former Australian of the Year, a woman whose entire public life is built on declining to be agreeable when the truth is ugly, replied that “difficult” is the misogynist’s code for a woman who won’t comply. The PM apologised for that one. On its own, a bad afternoon. Filed next to a melon gag and a $4.3 million house, it stops looking like an afternoon.

Over summer Albo didn’t go to the funerals of the Bondi victims. His office explained he was waiting to be invited, out of respect, so as not to intrude. NSW Premier Chris Minns went to most of them – services, vigils and shiva – and got a standing ovation at the memorial while the mention of Albanese drew boos. Maybe waiting for the invitation was the careful instinct of a man who knew he’d already lost that room. No one has ever built a leadership brand on the technically correct RSVP. You build it by walking in the door.

On a more earnest note, judging by commentary across socials, all of this has served to remind the public of the thing that has actually cost the party votes: a Federal Budget so badly sold the Government still hasn’t climbed out of the funk. A melon is a joke. A budget is not. They go in the same file anyway, because that file is labelled “Albanese” and there’s very little else in it.

Try this. Finish the sentence: “Anthony Albanese stands for ______.”

Coming up with the answer is harder than it should be for a man who’s held the top job since May 2022. It wasn’t always hard. There was a good, warm, likeable brand called Albo. The kid from council housing in Camperdown, single mum on the invalid pension, the inner-west boy who loves Australian music and used to turn up to gigs.

We, most of us anyway, really really wanted to back Albo. When he copped a bit of flack for lining up at an Inner West bahn mi store, we stood up for Albo for doing just about the most Inner West thing you can do at 1.00pm other than order a Guinness at The Vic. The goodwill then was specific, warm and – best of all – true. But he never banked it. The music barely rates a mention now. The backstory gets wheeled out for a doorstop and wheeled back into storage. Every stray act rushes into that vacuum to define him instead: let people get confused about what you stand for and they will build a version of you out of your offcuts. It’s the classic “if you don’t write your own story someone will write it for you” adage, now featuring a blonde woman in khakis and an air of distaste.

Malcolm Turnbull: whether you respect him or resent the silk-tongued harbourside barrister, you always knew which one you were doing. Julia Gillard: her misogyny speech fixed her public image in a single afternoon more definitively than her whole prime ministerial term. Pauline Hanson: a brand is so unwavering that whatever you make of her (and around the SKMG table that ranges from “NO” to “ABSOLUTELY NOT”) there is not a single person voting One Nation who is confused about what they’re buying. Lest we forget Kevin ‘07 who walked into the Lodge with a fully formed character and fluent Mandarin.

The brands of those politicians didn’t, or don’t, wobble when a bad clip lands, because the electorate signed the contract going in. Every Albanese stumble arrives fresh, every time, as a brand-new fact about the man and an erosion of the sort of character we hoped we were getting but see increasingly less evidence of.

A previous version of Albo gets that melon question, tells a story about the first time somebody explained crown melons to him, says something warm about the first woman ever to run Japan and passes a witty remark to the host reminding her that not every melon reference has to be about a woman’s body. That bloke had a goodwill bank.

Pity the Albo who let that goodwill bank run dry, turned to a podcast to reframe a brand built on sand and still can’t admit it was a bad judgement call. The vacuum that exists until that acknowledgement comes is sucking away more than Albo’s reputation: one melon, then two, then a diplomatic cable, a police referral, mentions in Federal Parliament and resurfaced disdain for that big black dog Labor can’t seem to shake (the budget). That’s the going rate for not saying sorry. I tell ya what, Hawkey would’ve copped it on the chin and got on with the job days ago.

What we’re currently obsessed with

Sam

We mentioned Bethesda and The Elder Scrolls VI a few weeks back, and in that time they’ve really ramped up the comms (likely pushed by Microsoft, given how restless the fanbase has become after eight years of near-silence). This week we got maybe the most significant confirmation of the game’s progress since the original teaser in 2018. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma visited Bethesda's studio, watched a live playthrough, and posted on X: “Live playthrough of The Elder Scrolls VI: ******** this morning.” Bethesda replied using the exact same format: "It was great being able to show you ********." Eight asterisks. The internet has been going crazy trying to figure out what the subtitle is. Dominion, Sentinel, Covenant, Redguard are all being thrown around. Bethesda has historically been masters of the drip-feed and tease, if Skyrim and Starfield are anything to go by. It looks like we’re finally entering the last leg before a proper reveal, which means there’s going to be some excellent drops coming, and maybe a few more asterisks too.

Neil

Instagram is a treasure trove of stuff you didn’t know you wanted or needed to know but are often quite happy to find. Example: amazingtimecapsule. Each post is a collection of music video clips of songs that made the Billboard charts in the US, ranked by where they landed in a year-end chart. It offers up lots of forgotten classics and the occasional song I’ve never heard before, like Mercy’s Love Can Make You Happy (it was a #2 hit in 1969 then deservedly sank into obscurity). What does this have to do with comms? Absolutely nothing. It’s just fun. Check it out.

Eliza

I yearn for The Pitt. So much so that I’ve started watching ER and not just for a young Noah Wyle… George Clooney is there too. I’m only halfway through episode three, and so far, so good. But my God, were TV episodes always this long? I’d forgotten that people used to wait a whole week, gather around the TV, and watch an hour-long show live to air, with no phones in sight. Every episode is basically a feature film. Maybe it’s a self-report, but safe to say TikTok, YouTube and the frankly irresponsible number of streaming services I subscribe to have ruined my attention span. I think the last time I actually waited for an hour-long show was maybe Game of Thrones? Even now, House of the Dragon, Stranger Things, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, my shameful lists of reality shows, and even The Pitt usually tap out around the 45-minute mark. I do miss the suspense of waiting and being rewarded with good writing, unexpected plot twists and no spoilers from social media. Although, to be fair, maybe ER isn’t the best example of top-tier writing.

Andrew

There’s much more I could say about bureaucracy in sharing this but alas, I have run out of time. The answer is Clarkson’s Farm, IYKYK.

If you’ve read anything on Junkee in the past few months that made you stop and think, there’s a pretty decent chance Sophie Hanson had something to do with it. She’s the editor in chief there, so she’s deciding what gets commissioned, who writes it and whether it’s good enough to go out with the Junkee name on it. Before that, she spent the better part of a decade living and working in the States, which left her with an American news habit she can’t shake and (as a direct result of said news) a deep appreciation for the fact that she no longer resides there.

Her MediaDiet contains a screen time of one hour and 35 minutes, which is so below our average that it’s somewhat suspicious. She’s someone who doesn’t answer her phone unless she recognises the number, who caps her weekly events at two because her social batteries need longer than most to recharge and who puts her phone down an hour before bed, clearly. Oh, and she still hasn’t listened to the new Charli xcx album yet, for which she would like to formally apologise.

Let’s dial in.

Wake up

I really try not to reach for my phone first thing in the morning but I’m still working on it. I usually do a scroll through The New York Times and The Guardian (both US and AU), as well as my inbox. I like to be as informed as I can; I grew up a very curious kid, so I cannot fathom the people who choose to “not read the news anymore” because of the state of the world. I get it, there’s a lot of bad stuff going on, but not being informed is how authoritarian governments take over. Having lived in the States for a better part of a decade, reading the US-based news makes me frustrated initially, then relieved I don’t live there anymore.

Morning

I take the train to work, including a 10 minute walk to the station. I tend to listen to Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, and if there’s a new episode of The Full Bleed Podcast, I’ll listen to that as well because I love hearing other editors talk about their careers and how they’re navigating the media landscape.

Afternoon

Depends what day of the week (and month) it is. Most days I’m responding to emails, whether that be making decisions on editorial that I’ll take on myself, commissioning freelancers, responding to publicists, or the occasional commercial brief. On Wednesdays I’m making sure our newsletter, the pov, goes out as scheduled, and at the end of the month I’m consolidating my expenses. Riveting stuff.

the pov

from junkee. culture analysis you'll tell your bestie. subscribe to see us in your inbox every wednesday

By junkee

On the newsletter front, I subscribe to 404 Media, an indie publication which was started by a handful of respected tech journalists.

TWIV which is a video games newsletter by an Aussie YouTuber, with excellent original reporting on the industry as well as features.

Back Row by Amy Odell is an insider look at the fashion industry and the people who run (or ran) it.

I’m gonna be honest about the phone situation. I rarely answer it unless I either recognise the caller or am expecting it. I really prefer to respond to people in my own time.

I also like to go to the gym or a run on my lunch break. It’s a nice way to break up the day.

Evening

I get invited to a fair few events during the week but I try to limit it to two (I’m an introvert so it takes a hot minute to recharge my social batteries). It’s why I like to leave the weekends sacred and do as little as possible; hang out with the dogs, my husband, maybe go out to a local restaurant.

I’m also trying to read more, so I put my phone down an hour before bedtime and try to dive into a book, colour, or write in my journal. The latter has been really great for helping consolidate my thoughts on the day.

Sophie’s Picks & Recs

SCREEN TIME: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

SUBSCRIBED TO: Deez Links, Maybe Baby.

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO READ: I mentioned this in our edition of the pov last week, but I’m trying desperately to read all of Patrick Radden Keefe’s work because I loved London Falling so much.

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO: Okay I feel like I need to start this section out with an apology. I haven’t listened to Charli xcx’s new album yet. So ... that’s on the list.

AN UNEXPECTED GOOGLE SEARCH: “The houses in Bly Manor and Hill House look the same on the inside”; turns out there were whole reddit threads discussing this!

A LINK WORTH FORWARDING: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/magazine/ai-actress-tilly-norwood.html.

INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT I’M LOVING RIGHT NOW: @impact, I just love how they visually represent a story.

Looks like it’s coming up bloody Andrew again. He’s 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.

“We have decided not to submit to the Grammys this year,” a translation of the group’s message read. “[We] hope that music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language. Thank you to ARMY and everyone who is always with us.”

That takes ARIRANG, a number one album from the biggest group on the planet, out of the running entirely – including Album of the Year – where it was expected to be one of the favourites.

By that evening, Grammy CEO Harvey Mason jr. had a statement out. He put his own name on it, demonstrated contrition and took the moment to offer a fact-check: entering the Asian pop category doesn’t lock an artist out of the General Field. Record, Song and Album of the Year all stay open.

Mason tried hard to defend his organisation’s thinking: “The Asian Pop category was created to celebrate the depth, artistry coming out of Asia… the spirit of this new category is to shine a dedicated spotlight on these important artists.”

Fair enough.

You’ll be expecting the usual from us here, a breakdown of what the Grammys fumbled in response to one of the world’s biggest pop groups opting to not participate in the new Asia Pop category, followed by a vaguely pompous rundown of how we’d have played it. Not today Satan.

The response from the Grammy CEO was… actually pretty good. Speaking freely, we’d have written something close to it. Maybe we would have run it through a few more channels, but on the explain aspect, Harvey Mason jr. said the right things in the right order with his own name on them. And it made virtually no difference.

The fact his response landed like a feather hitting a concrete floor makes this whole fandangle a far more useful case study than a simple bad statement. Act, Explain, Amplify is the model we operate communications strategies on for a reason: the order matters. A good statement is nothing if the premise is built on sand. That’s what we’ve seen play out in the case of the Grammys’ latest snafu: a complete lack of proactive crisis management. In simple terms, it’s about working out how much kindling is stacked in the room long before anyone goes near a match. On this particular issue, the Grammys have had nothing underneath them for a decade.

Anyone who has kept even one eye on the Grammys for the past decade could tell you this particular fire had a lot of kindling. BTS is not the first group or artist to question the politics of Grammy categories. Drake, Frank Ocean and The Weeknd have all voiced similar, albeit different, concerns.

In January 2020 Tyler, the Creator won Best Rap Album for IGOR and told the media room that “urban” was “just a politically correct way to say the n-word to me” and that half of him took the rap nomination as a backhanded compliment: “Like, oh, my little cousin wants to play the game, let’s give him the unplugged controller so he can shut up and feel good about it.” By June the Academy had dropped the word, turning Best Urban Contemporary Album into Best Progressive R&B Album. By November, Best World Music Album had become Best Global Music Album, a departure from “the connotations of colonialism”.

That same November, when nominations for the 2021 awards were announced, nominee Justin Bieber was puzzled (publicly) why his Changes album fell into the pop category. “Changes was and is an R&B album,” he posted on Instagram. “It is not being acknowledged as an R&B album, which is very strange to me. I grew up admiring R&B music and wished to make a project that would embody that sound. For this not to be put into that category feels weird, considering from the chords to the melodies to the vocal style, all the way down to the hip-hop drums that were chosen, it is undeniably, unmistakably an R&B album!”

Drake had made the same complaint in 2017, after Hotline Bling won two rap awards: “I’m a black artist, I’m apparently a rapper, even though Hotline Bling is not a rap song.” Frank Ocean refused to enter Blonde in 2016, calling it his “Colin Kaepernick moment” and flagging the Grammys’ historical failure to recognise black artists as an explanation for his decision. Jay-Z, on stage in February 2024 collecting a global impact award, noted that the artist with more Grammys than anyone alive had never won Album of the Year. Beyoncé finally got it in February 2025 for her country album Cowboy Carter.

(Ed’s note: the Grammys started in 1959. The first black artist to win Album of the Year was Stevie Wonder, in 1974, for Innervisions. Across 67 years of Grammy Awards, only 12 black artists have won Album of the Year. Here is the list. And if you’re wondering, Aretha Franklin isn’t on the list. Her 1967 album I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You, which is widely regarded as one of the greatest R&B albums ever, didn’t even crack it for a nomination. Yep, disgraceful.)

So, when Mason explains that artists are welcome to enter two categories, he’s not actually addressing the elephant in the room: an artist can enter multiple categories but it’s the screening committee of “genre experts” who decide whether the choice stands and can move a recording into another genre entirely. The rulebook reserves the Academy’s right “to place any selection into the Category it deems appropriate”. There’s no appeal system written into it anywhere. That’s the thing a decade of artists have been complaining about.

The statement is written in the American register of institutional contrition: sincere, first person, a gentle whisper of legalese. But it’s being read by a Korean industry and a global fandom with their own ideas about what accountability sounds like. Not to mention “Asia Pop” kind of glosses over the fact that the Asian region itself comprises a geographical region of intensely culturally diverse nations. We went through that a few weeks ago in Sumimasen.

The Grammys’ statement in isolation wasn’t bad and it may be factually correct that an artist can appear in multiple categories, but the fact of the matter is there just hasn’t been enough evidence of that actually happening.

In fairness, Neil went into the rulebook to prove the internet wrong and came back with plenty to prove the Grammys don’t always operate on a modus of cultural segmentation. Best Música Mexicana Album says in terms that “the musical style is determinative not the ethnicity of the performer(s)” and it was renamed for the 2024 awards after consultation with the Mexican music community. The Asian Pop rules carry the same line, with nationality added to it. On paper, this is a genre award like any other.

Then he found the language bar: the only one in the book that works as an exclusion rather than a way in. For Asia Pop, “recordings performed entirely in English are not eligible in this category”. That’s insane given the internal pressure on Korean artists to record in English over their native language in the interest of writing global hits. And that’s before we even get to KATSEYE, the HYBE and Geffen group comprising Filipino, Korean, Swiss and American members who are up for Best New Artist this year and for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance with Gabriela. This is the most deliberately global group built within the structure of the K-pop machine. It is also an act locked out of the Asian category. That doesn’t add up if this is a genre award rather than a racial or geographic fence.

Kindling aside, there was an easier way this particular instance could have been managed smarter: by understanding that if you’re representing a particular community, you actually have that community on board before you take it broader. Mason said the category had been “advanced by our Recording Academy members”, that “our members and Trustees felt this was the right moment”. Between then and 29 July, not one named artist, label executive or Asian industry body said a public word in favour of it.

The Korea Times went looking two days after the announcement and got a supportive quote from a K-pop agency, anonymously. Nothing from HYBE, SM, JYP or YG. Nothing from any Japanese or Chinese label. Nothing from Gold House, which runs the Gold Music Alliance with the Academy itself, or from Jonathan Yip: the Grammy-winning producer and sitting Academy Trustee who fronts that work. The Academy’s Asian and Pacific Islander membership has doubled since 2019. Sixteen K-pop artists joined its 2025 member class. None of them said a word.

Whoever the Academy talked to, nobody surfaced to say so. This is not good. The Global Music rename came with extensive conversations with artists, ethnomusicologists and linguists; Música Mexicana came with consultation with the Mexican music community. This one arrived with an anonymous “well done” from an unnamed agency. If it was not obvious, that’s a very awkward thing to have happened.

We should be straight about what that industry consultation gets you, because it isn’t always as simple as picking up the phone and being gifted a hall pass. In the case of BTS, they appear to be objecting to the category existing at all – that likely would not have changed with a phone call in May – but it does mean the Academy has an idea of how to Act before it has to Explain and Amplify a turd: a different name, a Korean label quoted in the release, one artist willing to go on the record. You don’t consult to win the argument, rather you want to understand that when the “no” lands, somebody other than you is willing to explain why you went ahead… if you go ahead. Mason had nobody, so he did it himself, in his own name on the worst day available.

The gold standard here is ARIA and yeah we’re biased as we work with them. When the Australian hip hop and R&B community had things to say about how the awards were built, ARIA went and got them in the room. Chief executive Annabelle Herd put the method on the record in June 2023, alongside a rewrite of the entry criteria: ARIA had “stepped up that process to create further channels for open communication, conducting deeper consultation with leaders and artists particularly in emerging and evolving genres”. By January 2024, that had become a Hip Hop and RnB Advisory Group: 19 artists, managers, independent labels and a music journalist, co-chaired by ARIA’s head of policy and a Warner A&R. Hau Latukefu, Kween G, Naomi Wenitong, Nina Las Vegas, Sosefina Fuamoli. Genre leaders and tastemakers, named, in the building.

That breathes a different story: an industry representative is only as good as the industry it collaborates with. In the absence of that collaboration, you’re torched. The shame of it is that making the effort to consult in this way can be unglamorous enough that most organisations never bother.

There was no version of last week’s events that worked in the Grammys’ favour, not by that point anyway. The statement is the correct output, but for a bad decision in the first place. It was written by the last person left holding it, to an audience that made its mind up in June based on 10 years of reasons to distrust what was being said. Now maybe, just maybe, the idea for an Asia Pop award genuinely came from a good place. We’re inclined to believe it actually did; the Grammys organisation has also done countless incredible things for the industry and is full of very smart people. Unfortunately, it just didn’t read the room on this one.

Our advice? Read the room. Understand what path you have walked before you have to talk your way out of something without the evidence to back it up. This was an over-exposed and sensitive issue for the Grammys as it was, it should have come with extra due diligence accordingly. That due diligence involves picking up the phone: you can’t retcon the past but you can get a better gauge on the future. Let people tell you “no” in private, a year before you need them saying “yes” in public. Otherwise seven people with hundreds of millions on speed dial can really ruin your morning. And even if you write the best statement of your career by that afternoon, you’re still facing the ARMY firing squad.

What we’re obsessed with this week

Neil

The talk above about Aretha Franklin’s classic album sent me searching for who won the Grammy for Album of the Year that year. It was the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Thirty nine minutes and 36 seconds of sheer genius and the best album cover ever (prove me wrong). That’s my obsession for the week ahead. A 59-year-old piece of art that changed an industry. Sgt. Pepper’s turns 60 on 26 May next year. If there isn’t a new collector’s edition, a new TV special and a four-week festival (there was a three-week one for the 50th anniversary), I’ll be seriously pissed off.

Eliza

I recently watched La Haine directed by Mathieu Kassovitz and it definitely lived up to the hype. Sitting in my Letterboxd watch list for close to a year, I kept missing my chances to watch it. Missing every movie screening, every special event, I even bought a subscription to Mubi only to be led astray by Google’s AI search. Until Apple finally added it to their store for $3.99. La Haine is a social thriller based in Paris in 1995 during police brutality protests. The film follows three boys — Vinz, Hubert and Saïd — wandering the Parisian suburbs over 24 hours after a violent riot that led to the shooting of Abdel Ichacha. Each friend represents a different ethnic and cultural background and a contrasting reaction to systemic marginalisation. Sounds tiresome, but it was completely captivating. Its raw realism, striking black-and-white cinematography and fluid tracking shots created a tense, real-time countdown structure that only heightens the narrative urgency. 5/5 stars.

Tess

This week’s obsession? Well... technically it’s my son’s. But as the responsible adult in the room, I’ve somehow become just as invested in the great Woolworths Ooshies hunt.

I’ve also become slightly obsessed with reading all the LinkedIn commentary analysing the marketing genius behind the campaign. We spend so much time talking about how hard it is to genuinely change consumer behaviour, yet the Ooshies seem to be achieving just that, because I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much money at Woolworths (we are a big shop at ALDI, small shop at Coles family), yet those little collectible things (what even are they?) have completely changed our shopping habits — at least for a few weeks until they all end up in landfill and I end up back at ALDI.

My son is now just three Ooshies away from completing the full set of 40, so naturally this feels like everyone’s problem now. If anyone has Mike Wazowski (Monsters, Inc.), Lightning McQueen (Cars) or Scorpion (Marvel) sitting in a drawer, holla at me.

Sam

Sorry guys, but it's still Jon Ossoff. Last week's obsession sent me down a Ossoff rabbit hole and I ended up listening to his recent appearance on The Bulwark Daily podcast, which is worth your time regardless of where you sit politically. He covers the Supreme Court narrowing the Voting Rights Act, the DOJ hanging a giant banner of the president from its building ("like some totalitarian farce") and the Iran conflict, which he calls "strategic and geopolitical malpractice". He describes the current administration's power grab as "ham fistedly executed" and labels the whole thing "Banana Republic stuff." Once again, just more cracking lines from him, delivered in his plain, serious, low, tones. What makes it compelling from a comms perspective is that fact… Ossoff never raises his voice or reaches for a soundbite. His matter-of-fact tone cuts through clearly. And it’s resonating; I haven’t been this interested in someone politically since Obama. In a time when everyone is shouting at the media and at podcasts and into the void, it’s quite a disruptive thing to just speak quietly and confidently.

Andrew

My friend Rory’s recently started a podcast, Those Who Build, drawing on his own friends in the start-up community who – at least from the eps I’ve listened to – are at the absolute bleeding edge of where consumer tech is heading. The guest list is stacked, the stories are crazy, and listening to much of this content has begun to border on masochism as I begin to feel like I’m running at quarter capacity.

Having said that, I finished the latest episode this morning featuring Chris Josephs from Autopilot. It’s my favourite so far. I won’t spoil it for you, but a business this fundamentally game changing for personal finance stemming from a meme speaks volumes for the way marketing and product – which, yes, have always worked hand in hand – has evolved for the modern social landscape. Also the Inverse Cramer Index is one of the funniest things I’ve heard this year.

Annabelle Cloros is someone we found before we found her. Her Substack, Service, Please!, landed in our obsessions of the week a while back because, well, anyone who writes about Sydney’s food scene was always going to end up on our radar. A freelance hospitality publicist, editor and former managing editor at Hospitality Magazine, Annabelle has spent years embedded in the world of dining, restaurants, openings, chefs and the people keeping this city well-fed. She knows the scene because she’s in it, many nights of the week, sometimes for work and sometimes just for the love of it all.

Her MediaDiet is part professional rigour, part Bravo devotion, and part iced coffee in the middle of winter. She checks her sleep score before she checks on the world. And her podcast algorithm is, by her own admission, completely lacklustre, which she will have accepted wholeheartedly by the time you finish reading this.

Let’s order in.

Wake up

As soon as I wake up I grab my phone and check my sleep score. If it’s less than 90, I'm very disappointed. This has become a really bad habit that I should probably try to break. After which, I'll check Instagram and any notifications before scrolling through TikTok (more bad habits), then it’s time for my usual oats and hazelnut ice latte… yes, even in winter!

Morning

I work from home, so there is no commute for me unless I have a meeting, and that's usually at a cafe. I listen to very few podcasts, mostly because I think my algorithm is a bit lacklustre, so I don't discover good ones very often. But I am very loyal to After Work Drinks, which I save for my daily walks.

Afternoon

I spend part of my day in front of my laptop writing my weekly Substack newsletter Service, Please! and creating content for Instagram on Canva. I’ll also work on any client projects and respond to enquiries.

I’ve been reading a lot more books lately, so that’s been a nice way to spend part of an afternoon. I’m currently reading Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash, which is very strange and very funny.

Evening

I cook most weeknights, sometimes something more ambitious (char siu) and other times, something straightforward (pasta a la various ways). I am unashamedly a Bravoholic, so I usually watch an episode or two of Housewives or Below Deck and keep up with anything else I’m watching like Cape Fear, Widow’s Bay or Silo.

Going out to eat is a big part of my job, so I like to try out new openings as well as go back to regular haunts. I went to ASHE last week, the new opening from the Bentley Group, and it was top tier.

Annabelle’s Picks & Recs

SCREEN TIME: 4 hours, 33 minutes

SUBSCRIBED TO: Vittles magazine

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO READ: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO: Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel

AN UNEXPECTED GOOGLE SEARCH: “Peony flower painting”

A LINK WORTH FORWARDING: The Nantucket Locals Who Are Sick of Influencers

INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT I’M LOVING RIGHT NOW: hite

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.”

Most brands treat criticism as something to bury. A handful have started doing the opposite. Sam sent round the Business of Fashion piece pulling the thread together, and the names on it – Béis, Dove, Primark – are all mining their own bad press for material. Laughing along takes the sting out of the critics but it also shows something less common: that someone at the brand is paying attention.

Turning reviews into assets isn’t reinventing the wheel. There’s the litany of tourism ads led by Vienna and co-opted by the likes of Copenhagen. Domino’s did it in 2009 by building a whole turnaround on customers calling its pizza cardboard, filming its own chefs reading the reviews and then fixing the recipe. That act of public penance (and the results it generated) helped turn Domino’s into a stockmarket darling, adding something like $US12 billion in enterprise value over the decade that followed. Fashion was slower to the idea, but Instagram and Reddit have turned every misstep into a public event, so the flak got too loud to ignore and – in the end – too useful to waste. In February, Dove put real Reddit reviews of its new 10-in-1 hair mask on billboards, the flattering ones featuring alongside ones like “I hate the smell, it’s like an old lady wearing too much intense perfume”. The negative reviews were far less common, sure, but they also gave the positive reviews a greater chance to sing in contrast, backed up by the insurmountable trust garnered by a brand willing to be totally transparent about what customers think.

This is why owning the bad reviews can be so effective: it immediately creates trust, but it also reminds you that there are – in fact – people behind the brand and the purchase of its products. Having said that, only hand your critics the microphone if you’re fairly sure the product will survive the scrutiny. It’s the same bet the David protein bars were making earlier this year, daring you to believe 150 calories could taste of anything. But the trick has limits: unless you’re using the roast to highlight that the good far outweighs the bad (a la Copenhagen or Dove), you should only lean into the complaint you can actually fix. As VML’s Ellie Bamford put it to The Business of Fashion, you don’t make light of a deep moral or ethical failure, you pick the thing you can resolve to the customer’s advantage, or you pick a perception you actually want to shift.

The self-roast can do a third thing too: correct the record. A fair bit of Béis’ redesign fuss was really re-education, using the jokes to tell customers the Weekender was always built to slide onto a rolling case and that the Mini works as a personal item on its own. Owning the gripe buys you the attention to fix the misunderstanding that started the whole ordeal.

All of this is really tone of voice, the explain in our act-explain-amplify model. You earn the right to be self-deprecating the way Duolingo earned the right to be unhinged, in small deposits over years.

Primark did a version in March with “Shockingly Chic”, which featured models feigning horror that clothes that cheap could look that good, a straight spoof of the luxury ads it couldn’t afford to imitate seriously. Being in on the joke that Primark is nobody’s idea of a catwalk brand landed harder than any attempt to pretend otherwise. Even the stiffest houses at the top end of fashion are loosening up, partly, because they’ve all built content libraries now and something has to fill them.

The brands that come undone are the ones that want the funny voice without the years that allow it. There’s a much-shared LinkedIn carousel making the case that every brand now wants to be your best mate. It’s exhausting. Warmth you haven’t earned is a bit like a stranger being oddly familiar with you. The line you’re walking is between self-aware and self-conscious, which side you land on depends on whether there’s anything real behind the joke.

The reason all of this is surfacing has a lot to do with the machines. Scepticism is running hot. “People are more sceptical than they’ve ever been,” Bamford told The Business of Fashion, and audiences now assume the polished thing is fake before they assume it’s real. A wonky, self-aware brand is trustworthy precisely because it’s hard to fake and the rawness lets people feel they’re behind the scenes, in on the thing rather than the target of a finished ad. Elizabeth Tan at the forecaster WGSN put the appeal plainly in that same article: publishing the real reviews adds “a layer of real humans, it’s not just the dead internet with bots adding comments on your product”. It’s the dead-internet theory rewritten as a marketing brief. When the feed is bots reviewing bots, a real person calling your mask old-lady perfume becomes proof of life.

It’s no surprise then, that in this environment Substack’s chief executive Chris Best switched on an AI detector across the platform, claiming: “We’re sick of slop and we don’t want Substack to turn into LinkedIn.” The tool reckons LinkedIn now runs at 41% machine-written, Substack around 10%. Brutal.

Best is doing a version of what Béis and Dove did, albeit without roasting his own business. Ultimately it comes down to instilling conviction that a person is still in the room. Having said that, Dove’s Reddit campaign didn’t only win over sceptical humans: AI search tools lean on Reddit as a store of honest opinion, so all that curated candour also pushed Dove higher up the answers in ChatGPT. The Dove team knew the community would clock any heavy hand interfering. Brands are now hamming up their humanity partly so the machines can still tell it’s in there. We’re going to call it cyborg marketing (note that as the SECOND Donna Haraway reference COMMPRESS has managed to pull off).

The same instinct turns up wherever a brand can behave like a person instead of a logo. For a while a viral social format was for a vaguely known influencer to board a flight, caption it “let’s see how many brands can comment before I land”, and watch Samsung, Apple and others pile in under a video for the lols. It’s there in Gelato Messina’s Instagram or Wendy’s social presence: the brand gone rogue tone that becomes less about brand tone of voice and more of a reminder that there is, in fact, just an employee with a log in, password and creative licence to do whatever the hell they want on the internet.

Having said all this, it all only counts if you’re adding value. Diving into the comments is a horror if you aren’t funny. And the day every brand runs the same self-aware bit off the same content calendar, the self-awareness is gone. It all just becomes a blancmange of slicker slop.

So roast yourself, publish the bad reviews, play the fool. But don’t do it to be cool or chase a trend. Do it to remind your community that you’re not a logo, name, product or service: you’re a group of people willing to have a conversation.

What we’re obsessed with this week

Tess

This wonderfully funny satirical Shouts & Murmurs piece in The New Yorker: To-Do List for While My Baby Naps. It takes the tiny window of opportunity every parent dreams about and stretches it into an increasingly ludicrous catalogue of impossible achievements. Beneath the absurdity is a very real truth about modern parenting, where even “rest” can feel like another item on the to-do list.

Sam

It’s Jon Ossoff, the US Democratic senator from Georgia. If you haven't come across him yet, go watch this video of him questioning Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, during a Senate confirmation hearing two weeks ago. Ossoff asks Clayton (repeatedly, calmly, and without raising his voice once) who won the 2020 election. Clayton refuses to answer. But Ossoff doesn’t flinch or grandstand or anything, he just keeps pressing until Clayton physically has to turn away from him in silence. Then Ossoff delivers the line: “Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge the president's delusions?” It’s a cracking line. It’s the tone that does it for me… low, measured, quite unsettlingly serious. Folks commenting on it have made comparisons to Tom Cruise pressing Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. Back in February, Ossoff coined the phrase “the Epstein class” to describe the Trump administration at an Atlanta rally that went mega viral and has since become a rallying point for Democrats calling for sharper and more populist messaging. He says he has zero interest in a 2028 presidential run but prediction markets have doubled his odds in the past month alone and people online are calling his recent appearances “Succession-level” political maneuvering. Whether he runs or not, it’s been refreshing to watch someone in American politics who looks like they’re actually prepared to say what they think without checking the room first.

Neil

The marketing folks at The Coca-Cola Company are smart people, but even smart people do things that are puzzling. Earlier this month, they announced new packaging for brand Coca-Cola and its offspring, Coca-Cola Zero Sugar. The key change? Instead of black words on a red background, Coke Zero will be white words on a red background… just like the main Coke brand. Sure, the former will have the words “Zero Sugar” in big letters on it. But did no one spot the obvious danger: someone not paying attention and picking a can or bottle of Coke instead of Coke Zero… because they are going to look so similar! As a dedicated Coke Zero drinker (yes, I know the risks), I won’t be happy when the new packaging gets to Australia. I’m not dumb, but I do reach for things in a supermarket or C-store by instinct. I’m sure the Coke people researched the crap out of this change. But what people say in research groups doesn’t always tally with how they behave in the real world. I’m hoping Coke sees the error of its ways and brings back the black words. I’m too vain to drink full-sugar Coke.

Eliza

I’d never thought I’d be able to say it, but I did it; I actually finished The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov is less a novel than a full-scale psychological siege. It’s dense, sprawling and occasionally feels like every character has four names purely to test your resolve, but once it gets its hooks into you, there’s no escaping it. Dostoevsky turns murder, faith, guilt and family dysfunction into the most compelling argument you’ll ever read for why humans are endlessly contradictory. It’s exhausting, brilliant and somehow leaves you feeling like you’ve lived several lifetimes by the final page (in a good way!). A masterpiece that absolutely earns its reputation; just clear your schedule, and maybe keep a character list handy.

Andrew

Guys I made an online friend! The internet is crazy. But seriously, I subscribed to a new Substack recently, left its latest issue at the top of my “other” inbox to finish reading, and it seemingly blew up the view count by clicking on it every time I opened that inbox enough for its author to reach out personally. This was vaguely mortifying. Nonetheless I’m going to double down on being a fanboy and say the latest issue of Patrick Kho’s The Chow is excellent. One, because it allows me to live vicariously through a summary of the Lin Kwai Fong club scene, but more specifically because it speaks to a nagging thought I’ve had after reading W. David Marx’s Blank Space, and subsequently this review asking why older white guys keep saying culture’s dead.

Kho explores (among other things) the rebranding of goth, the symbolism of mushrooms in club culture and the liminal spaces of the internet that have given rise to whole new movements in music. His thesis “far too many critics like to say that the 2020s are devoid of new art and music. But perhaps, the true newness can be found in what we’re struggling to name” is my whole reason for sharing. Without drawing too long a bow and blowing out the word count, this is the challenge presented by a lot of the work I’ve been tackling lately: distilling far-reaching, complex and to some minds boring concepts into things that resonate with people. Point being, you can’t act on or give a shit about something if you can’t name it in simple terms. Until you do that, those on the outer will continue drawing their own – often wrong – conclusions and writing the alternate narrative for you. Mind you, some things are always much cooler if they stay undefined.

Tess Fuller would like you to know that she is, in her own words, a decidedly anti-capitalist ass whose job is actually a large part of who she is.

As Head of Content and Brand at Teach Us Consent, she creates campaigns, partnerships and content that encourage healthier conversations about consent while advocating for policies that help reduce sexual violence.

On any given day, Tess will start with a swim at Bronte, willingly spend time doomscrolling the manosphere (an occupational hazard), lose herself in podcasts and social research, and finish with a book that makes her rethink the internet all over again.

This is a MediaDiet from someone who has managed to build a career that lives alongside her values… and that’s reflected in everything she consumes.

So let’s lean on in.

Wake up

My phone has been banned from my bedroom this year, which I regret to inform everyone it actually is all it’s cracked up to be. So, my first waking moments are spent smashing the button on my analogue alarm clock and staring out the open window. (I have a vague 2021 memory of a sleep expert dribbling some protocol on a podcast about looking at the sun in the morning being good, and it stuck. Good for what? idk). If I’m feeling brave, I’ll catch up on the news quickly via The Briefing or 7am, or a tender mood sees me dip into my last musical hyper-fixation as I potter around.

Morning

I work from home so I like to delineate my morning with a walk or a dip. As an audio accompaniment, I usually whack on Shameless (shamelessly), a fresh episode of Off Menu with James Acaster and Ed Gamble or Overthink Podcast if I'm feeling like over-intellectualising everything. Then I look at the water in Bronte for as long as it takes to make me feel not guilty for living so close to the beach but not always being there —because, of course, I have a job.

Afternoon

I spend time scrolling the manosphere, which I wouldn’t recommend (keeping my friends close and my enemies closer) and counterbalance this content for my sanity by keeping up with the latest Teach Us Consent-related happenings from Missing Perspectives, Barrett Pall and Professor Neil. I think LinkedIn has TikTok-ified their algorithm and it’s popping atm, so I often get lost in the abyss of brand analysis and the latest research about sexual violence prevention.

Evening

After a life of resisting sitcoms, I’m leaning in and watching them all for the first time cover to cover. I’m on my sixty-second episode of Modern Family and absolutely transcending. Then, I jump in bed with a book for anywhere between 20 minutes and two hours. I’m on an unintentional tear with books about how social media has fucked with us. Right now I’m reading Yesteryear,and more recently I’ve finished Like, Follow, Die, which is an adolescence-inspired incel-centric whodunnit, and Girl On Girl by Sophie Gilbert that I highlighted beyond readability. My top pick of the year is Rejection, a series of fictional short stories by Tony Tulathimutte. It’s the most absorbing, hilarious, sickeningly twisted and thrilling social commentary I have ever read, no hyperbole. Select quotes from Goodreads give just the right amount away.

Tess Fuller’s Picks & Recs

SCREEN TIME: 2 hours, 32 minutes (and so much more enlightened than u).

SUBSCRIBED TO: I’m late to the party, but link in bio has me in a chokehold.

Link in Bio

A newsletter about working in social media.

By Rachel Karten

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO READ: The Feminist, a short story by Tony Tullathimutte published online that preceded the full collection.

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO: Listen to our Fix Our Feeds campaign video with your eyes too:

AN UNEXPECTED GOOGLE SEARCH: “RSVP stand for what”.

A LINK WORTH FORWARDING: https://www.teachusconsent.com/fix-our-feeds.

INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT I’M LOVING RIGHT NOW: @notfit4main because how are they orchestrating all of this?

There is a television ad from Japan we should have a chat about and no it’s not Dole Banana. It’s not that wonderful man from the SkyPiece ads who talks on the cab screens or the weird ones Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared in. We would like to talk about the Nicholas Cage pachinko commercials but apparently they’re of little value. Nah, today we’re talking about ice cream.

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.

Garigari-kun, a soda-flavoured ice block that had cost 60 yen since roughly the first Bush administration, was going to 70. A rise of 10 yen and Akagi Nyugyo filmed the confession like a state funeral and ran it in prime time.

Let’s backspin for a quick sec to revisit some of the general crisis advice we’ve given and continue to give: an apology is a big old last resort. Unless direct malfeasance is present, plenty of research points to the psychological shift that happens when a CEO or figurehead displays empathy, takes responsibility and describes proactivity versus when they just say “we’re sorry”. The latter implies tacit guilt and channels public attention onto the apologetic individual. If you’re looking to get your CEO out of a job fast, this is a great way to go about it.

And yes, before you say it, we know Telstra has had an outage, and yes, we have plenty to say about the fact they led with “we’re sorry”, albeit days after the event and unwarranted. This was an example of a stupid sorry. A simple “it’s not you, it’s us” text during the blips of reception in the actual outage, followed by an indication they were working on a solution, would have gone much further to quell outrage. Instead we got days of mainly silence followed by a grovelling blanket apology with more “us”, “we” and “our customers” in it than a willingness to address “you”. No one wants to be addressed as someone’s customer in a crisis. Always remember people don’t give a shit how you feel, they just want to know if their phone is working and what you’re doing about it. Anyway, no, this issue isn’t about Telstra. Every other try-hard comms professional in Australia has tried that on. And honestly, we CBF.

What we’re looking at is why Akagi Nyugo’s 10-year-old apology – which was made in advance of any media reporting or public outrage over the price rise and which alerted the public to the price rise, adding fuel to a potential fire and going against every piece of advice we would ever give – worked. Because seriously, it worked.

The clip went viral as gratitude rather than mockery swept Japanese audiences. The apology was a deft slight-of-hand, highlighting the fact the company managed to keep the price flat for a quarter of a century when every other product was jacking up costs and saying nothing about it. The public decided the honourable response was to thank them for the restraint and for eating the cost year after year before finally passing along a few yen. Sales held. When Akagi did it again in 2024, edging the price to 80 yen, they uploaded this to their website and by their own account, bowed even lower. They also planned for the future, which is nice (scroll down if you didn’t). It worked a second time. A company said sorry for charging more and its customers came away feeling looked after.

Try to imagine an Australian company doing that (pick any company, EVERYONE seems to be jacking up their prices these days). You can’t. A price rise in Australia is treated as a small act of aggression and a national ad in which your executives bow in penance would land as either a piss-take or a cover-up,. You don’t have to be a member of MENSA to understand a white Australian bowing would be bizarre because the cultural codes are wrong, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The bow itself is a physical symbol of a much deeper system of belief, a cultural code, shared by the country. It’s the same reason you can pretty much get by travelling through Japan knowing only the word sumimasen, which loosely translates to an informal sorry but can double as excuse me, thank you and even a soft hello. Kind of like fuck in Australia, which incidentally is why this was a forking great ad here but would never fly in Japan.

Japanese culture rewards honour through modesty; an apology is still an apology but cultural codes mean it is interpreted in a very unique way. This is the general thesis we’re playing at here, everyone understands culture shapes how we make meaning, but very few call out the impact this has on handling crisis communications, or earned media at large, across borders.

We got onto all of this because of a LinkedIn post that did the rounds a few weeks back and irritated us in a productive way. A UK publicist was taking a victory lap – chest out, analytics screenshotted – for losing a client. The client had grown, wanted its media handled on both sides of the Atlantic, and asked her to take on the US work alongside the UK. She said “no”, and turned the “no” into content: British journalists and American journalists want completely different things, she explained, so anyone promising you a single firm that can do “global” is selling you a fantasy. Allegedly the good operators know their one market and stay in it. It got a lot of applause in the comments. It is also, we think, exactly half right. The most dangerous kind of right there is.

Markets are genuinely, structurally different. One way to prove it is to keep watching what happens when things go wrong; a crisis is where a culture shows you its actual rules. Elaine Scarry talked about this in Thinking In An Emergency when she pointed out that when your focus is arrested on something that immediately requires your attention, background thinking kicks in. Background thinking is largely determined by ingrained cultural codes; it’s why you say “ouch” as soon as you bump something even though it didn’t hurt, or why you might squeal at the presence of a mouse even though you’re not scared.

In the case of an apology, fly two hours from Osaka to Seoul and the bow exists, but carries very different contexts: it’s usually more of a bob to say a hello or thank you than a structured thing with carefully coded angles. An apologetic bow in Korea is far less common and conducted in person, kneeling on the ground. It is saved for when you’re very, very sorry as it’s quite an embarrassing thing to have to do. It is a tacit admission of disgrace. It’s a reactive thing versus proactive and it’s not something you could ever make light of.

An incident in 2014 offers a retrospectively hilarious example: Korean Air vice-president, Cho Hyun-ah, was served macadamias in first class in a bag rather than a bowl. The horror. She was so sufficiently displeased that she ordered the taxiing aircraft back to the gate to offload the chief purser (chaebols amirite?).

Korea named it “nut rage” and coined a word off the back of it, gapjil, for the casual cruelty of the powerful toward the people who have to serve them. What’s instructive is the apology. The chairman, her father Cho Yang-ho, came out and apologised with a deep bow as a father, asking “for the public’s generous forgiveness” as both chairman and parent. His daughter resigned her posts and was, for a time, jailed for obstructing aviation safety. In Korea a founding family personally wears the disgrace when one of its own detonates.

The instinct of many Australian board in a case like this – likely be a strange pithy statement issued through media, a standing down of the offending party and an ongoing investigation – would have read in Seoul as cowardice. If Japan and Korea can’t share a playbook across a two-hour flight, the idea that one strategy can be aimed at APAC from a desk in London is a fairy tale.

Despite this, comms agencies do, in fact, work across cultures. This is what the LinkedIn take relies on you not thinking too hard about. In Singapore, the smartest move in a crisis is frequently the one you don’t make: the major newspapers run through a state-funded trust, TV runs through Mediacorp, and an online-falsehoods law sits over the lot with near-total compliance. The result is a media culture deferential enough that a late train can be a genuine national story while a corporate stumble gets a fraction of the oxygen an Australian newsroom would pour on the same event.

Everything comms people are trained to do when a crisis hits – get ahead of it, comment early, feed the beast before it feeds on you – can be precisely the wrong reflex because in a market where the story was never going to travel, a loud full-throated response may simply write the story for the people who weren’t going to run one.

The Americans are their own puzzle: comms people in big US companies are weirdly tight-lipped and paranoid about protecting their health insurance (you can’t blame them for that). Companies rarely push hard on the media because the media landscape is so vast and so fractured they can hold their line, stay boring and play outlets against each other almost indefinitely. Of course, a massive crisis can go proper Fyre Festival, but most media in the US is not the attack-dog British tabloid engine. The French, for their part, tend to hold everything close and volunteer nothing, and are comfortable letting a silence do the talking in a way that would give even an American comms lead hives.

So, yes, markets are different, sometimes unbridgeably so, and anyone who tells you otherwise has never had to place the same story in Jakarta and Boston in the same week. But the conclusion our offending LinkedIn publicist draws from all that is a cop-out. “It’s too hard to do more than one properly, so I’ll only ever do the one I already know” is a perfectly reasonable personal boundary and a genuinely poor description of our job when done well. It skips an entire layer of what we do: it’s the explain in our old adage of act, explain, amplify.

It’s entirely possible, more possible than ever in fact, to “do the world” and understand how culture works. It’s a big part of how to actually move yourself up the value chain from a PR style mouthpiece to a more strategic adviser and communicator. The person who has actually learned the codes of more than one market and can move between them is an asset to any team, even if you’re working in one territory. That is not to say a comms person can’t consult or contract experts who specialise in an individual market, but it doesn’t preclude them from leading a global client.

The global brands worked this out about five ago. That was apparent when Neil and Andrew sat in Cannes watching Heineken hoover up a stack of Lions and boast the machine underneath the trophies was local creative control, a central idea held loosely by local teams trusted to bend it to their own audience and move fast on whatever’s live in their market that week.

That’s what is sitting in the blind spot between the unnamed publicist’s two presented options: one hero running 30 markets off a laptop isn’t a great choice, but it’s equally as rough to have 30 strangers each running one market in isolation. It’s the roughest choice for anyone, regardless of occupation, to remain close-minded to learning the intricacies of another culture simply because they know their own very well. That just makes you boring.

None of this, if we’re honest, is a new lesson so much as the only lesson. We called the very first issue of this thing “Pity the Reader”. But this all gets particularly heightened in a crisis, when the business has less time to think and the audience is most likely to rely on the most internalised of social cues. The deep bow is a masterstroke in Japan and petrol on a fire nearly everywhere else. The closest thing to a universal law in any of this is that you should find out if you’re running into the burning room with an extinguisher or a tin of petrol before you open your mouth.

What we’re currently obsessed with

Tess

The gloriously petty FIFA World Cup bet between Norwegian Air and British Airways. Before England played Norway, the two airlines agreed that whoever lost would swap their Instagram logo for the winner’s for 24 hours. When England won, Norwegian Air followed through and proudly wore BA’s colours.

I wish I’d been a fly on the wall when this idea was initially pitched. I just love that a heritage brand like British Airways can engage in a little harmless marketing fun, and that what is quite a traditional brand is willing to show a sense of humour.

Sam

As a longtime lover of The Moon Lists on Instagram, I’ve finally (and quite late to it, mind you) started getting across their content on Substack. When I get a spare moment lately, I find myself going for a peruse through their archives. Some recent faves have been: Prompts for a plot twist, Anaïs Nin’s diagrams of her orbits of friends, the 1930s term “going Santa Fe” for being lesbian, and the above image that really sums up the whole ethos of Moon Lists… which is about how to pay attention differently.

Neil

I don’t tell many people this, but I like Iron Maiden. Not in the same way I like Lainey Wilson or Hall & Oates, but Run For The Hills and The Trooper are stone cold classics. So I’m mildly obsessed with this week’s news that the band has sold 50% of their music catalogue and intellectual property to Pophouse Entertainment (one of the owners of which is Bjorn Ulvaeus from ABBA, who are an enduring obsession). The catalogue bit is not surprising – everyone is doing that these days – but the sale of part of their name, image, likeness and Eddie (the band’s iconic mascot) is interesting. The members of the 51-year-old band say it will enable them to “pursue new creative ventures that connect with existing fans”. I’m not sure how, but it feels like a smart move. Iron Maiden is a well differentiated, albeit ageing, brand that has built a very, very strong goodwill bank among consumers. But every brand can do with a fresh pair of eyes on it to help create new ideas. I, for one, cannot wait for the Iron Maiden-ABBA collab. Anyone for The Super Trooper?

Andrew

Honestly the only answer is the Nicholas Cage Pachinko ads. I’m sitting at the piano learning how to play the Favourite Things song right now (the trick is to do it poorly). I mean yes, they’re gambling ads and gambling is horrible but – the weird triplets one aside – these offer some of Cage’s best performances since Vampire’s Kiss. They’re ethereal in a way no other Hollywood in Japan ad series has managed to top, which is crazy because 1) there is a plausibly never-ending amount of Hollywood cameos in Japanese advertising and 2) it’s Japanese advertising. Anyway I’m going to go watch the SkyPiece ads, close my eyes and pretend I’m hearing them in a cab from Haneda. Beats the shit out of meditation.

Eliza

Leviticus, Adrian Chiarella’s debut horror film, took horror to a new depth. It delivers laughter, tears and probably the best jump scare I’ve seen in ages. Set in a Bible-thumping Australian rural town, the film follows Naim and Ryan, two teenage boys whose romance is discovered by their parents and met with a religious ceremony meant to “cure” them. As you can imagine, that does not happen. It’s a thread I’ve been noticing in horror recently, specifically Australian horror. Thinking back to Talk to Me, Bring Her Back, even The Babadook, genre convention is rarely the destination. It’s a vehicle for something larger, in the case of Leviticus, the brutality of conversion therapy. A jump scare makes you sit up; Leviticus uses that attention to force its audience to confront grief, heartbreak and the reality beneath the horror. The scars don’t dilute the emotion; they sharpen it because the film earns a fuller emotional register. The lesson here? A story that only ever plays one note is easier to tune out, because the audience knows what’s coming and braces early.

I know you’re expecting this issue to come out swinging all things GTA 6. But bear with us for a sec, we’ll get there.

Somewhere in this office is a grown man who played The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in year 12. That was 2012. Its sequel was formally announced in 2018 and consists, at the time of writing, of 36 seconds of drone footage shot over some mountains. A lot has changed in the 14 years since, except the 36 seconds of mountains, which remains the only output from Bethesda, the makers of Skyrim. Todd Howard, the man who announced it, now asks people to “pretend we didn’t announce it”, which is a sentence we think about a lot in this job.

And that’s only the second-most famous wait in gaming. Well, third if you count Half-Life 3, but for the sake of everyone reading this we will leave that chest unopened. 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.

Now, the numbers this produces are properly stupid. When Rockstar dropped the first GTA 6 trailer in December 2023, it did over 90 million views in 24 hours, a Guinness World Record, beating MrBeast, a man whose entire career is the science of being watched. That’s 90 seconds of footage for a game you could not buy for another three years, out-rating the most engineered videos on earth.

Games marketing also does something most industries would treat as a leak: it sells the making-of as the product. Pokémon stamps “test footage” on early gameplay and (we suspect at least) encourages leaked footage themselves, studios sell half-finished builds and patch them in public, and GTA 6’s screenshots have been memed for years precisely because you can watch the graphics improve between batches. Film studios treat reshoots like a court suppression order, game studios fling open the sausage factory and show you the thing raw (which is a gross sentence in retrospect).

That’s what makes Rockstar’s past 14 months such a gift. They delayed the game twice – which isn’t by any means unheard of – but how they handled it was, well, odd.

Delay one, May 2025: the game slips a year but four days later, trailer two lands and does 475 million views across platforms in a day. The community forgave the delay because the bad news came with a gift.

Delay two, November 2025: six more months, delivered via a polite paragraph on the Newswire. Then seven months of nothing, during which the only Rockstar story in circulation was the firing of 30 or so UK staff (leaks, said Rockstar; union-busting, said the staff).

People notice when one person in a conversation stops talking. They don’t wait around in the quiet, either; they start supplying your lines for you. The subreddits filled with theories that development was cooked, the engine was broken or the game could never live up to it now. All that had actually changed was the cadence. After years of being shown the kitchen, silence smells like something burning.

Dr Marcus Collins (who we probably should be paying at this point) makes the point that people congregate around shared beliefs and the product is just the totem. Church congregations keep holding services whether or not the preacher shows up. Hollow Knight fans spent six near-silent years painting themselves in literal clown makeup every time Silksong skipped another showcase, a whole community inventing rituals to survive the absence of information. And congregations talk among themselves in ways no brand can script: they gatekeep (“I was here before the Netflix adaptation”), they form hierarchies, they haze newcomers, and at a certain critical mass (ask any K-pop stan), they turn feral. A community left alone keeps talking, about you, without you.

Silksong shipped last September, by the way, and all was forgiven. But there sits a tempting wrong lesson: silence is survivable. It is, if your product is generational and there’s no substitute. Rockstar holds that insurance policy. Most companies an brands do not.

A community is a friendship and a friendship is a very long conversation. You can’t go quiet for months because things got a bit awkward, then act wounded when your friend wandered off and found someone chattier. Part of the contract between a brand and its customers is respect, and most of the wreckage in this genre is a breach of that one clause. (Neil would like the record to show that Lauryn Hill has been personally breaching his since 1998.)

It happens well beyond games. Patrick Rothfuss took over a million dollars from fans in December 2021 for a single chapter of his long-promised third fantasy novel, due “February 2022 at the latest”. It still hasn’t appeared. Attack on Titan named its ending “The Final Season” in 2020, then stretched the final season across four years, multiple parts and a film, until the audience began to turn on what many called the most powerful anime of all time purely because of the disrespect. And at last month’s Xbox showcase, trailers kept opening with “BETHESDA PRESENTS” while grown adults (see: the Skyrim man, above) held their breath, before each one resolved into something that was not The Elder Scrolls VI. Eight years on, the top of that subreddit has curdled from hype into exhaustion. Announce anything. Please. A shed. Different mountains. Anything.

These are three different sins – the paid-and-broken promise, the misleading promise and the premature one – but they have the same outcome: a congregation primed to meet your next sermon with folded arms.

That’s not to say Bethesda is bad or uncaring. They have also owned the redemption arc. Volunteer modders spent over a decade building Skyblivion, a fan remaster of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion using the Skyrim engine. When Bethesda shadow-dropped its own official Oblivion remaster in April 2025, it could have lawyered the fan project into the ground (a very Nintendo move that makes even the most hardcore Nintendo fan in the office’s toes curl). Instead it gave every member of the team the keys to Bethesda’s in-house remake to help them finish the job, praised the project publicly and confirmed it wasn’t going anywhere. It treated a direct competitor to its own launch like a fan club. The same company that can’t live down a teaser produced maybe one of the best community gestures we can think of. It comes down to which instinct wins on the day: the corporate one or the friendly one.

If you want the counter-example to everything we’ve said so far, it’s the Skyblivion one. The fan remake was announced in 2012 and is still not out. On paper, sounds like exactly the kind of wait we’ve been roasting, but actually it holds the key to unlocking our point. The difference is that the Skyblivion team (of volunteers mind you) never stopped talking to their community. Developer diaries, quest walkthroughs, build updates, and honesty around when things stalled have all remained persistent for 14 years. This is a phenomenal task of community management.

We spend a lot of time on how to find a community (the Backrooms) and how to build one (the beehive, which Dr Collins will note we’ve now mentioned in consecutive issues). We spend far less on the conversation that keeps one alive, which is odd for a trade whose whole craft is meant to be conversation.

Maintaining a conversation runs on the rules you already know from being a person. Change how often or how warmly you speak and the other side hears it, whatever you intended. Bad news lands better when you arrive holding something, the way Rockstar did in May. Silence never seems neutral; give people enough of it and they stop asking what you meant and start deciding for themselves. And goodwill gets banked for exactly one purpose: affording you honesty when the news is bad. Fans will wait out a slip up. Rockstar’s November mistake was going corporate on a conversation they’d spent a decade earning the right to have like a person. They had the permission but chose a media release.

Rockstar will be fine, obviously. A new trailer last month and pre-orders confirmed means the wallets are out and the memes joyful. Generational products buy that kind of grace, but it shouldn’t undermine the lesson for your own brand.

Go quiet for long enough and the campfire keeps burning without you. The community brings its own wood and you lose any say in the stories they tell around it.

What we’re currently obsessed with

Neil

To borrow from what you just read, part of the contract between a brand and its customers is respect. Treat customers well and they will probably come back for more. Treat them badly and they will be pissed off. Yep, I’m looking at you Lauryn Hill. She was the breakout star in the Fugees then dropped The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, a stunning and inventive album that critics loved, fans bought in droves and landed her on the cover of TIME. The album was released on 19 August 1998. Almost 28 years on, we’re still waiting for a second album. Sure, she had kids, wrote songs for other people and spent time in jail for tax fraud. But 28 years? Lauryn’s recent performances at the Grammys and the BET Awards simply rubbed salt in the wound. Music fans expect new music. Customers expect respect. Neither is too much to ask.

Andrew

Sea monsters bro. Maybe I’m still on the cryptid jag from our creepypasta issue a couple weeks back, but the assertions in this Do Not Research article (which is an art and internet culture Substack founded by Joshua Citarella that you should check out from time to time) are an interesting way of thinking about how culture works, even if the article itself gets a little jumpy in the tail end. In the same way Godzilla stole the hearts and minds of Japan as an allegory for the very real nuclear cataclysm that had befouled the place, this article tracks how the noise of an icequake – caused by the very real threat of climate change – took on a new life as an internet-enabled monster.

Sam

The World Cup, like everyone else! But specifically, USA v Belgium, which played at the time of writing this issue. Belgium won 4-1 (thankfully) but the backstory is where it gets juicy: the leading US scorer Folarin Balogun was red carded in the previous game against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Under FIFA rules, it’s an automatic one-game suspension. Except Donald Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino (the man who awarded Trump the inaugural “FIFA Peace Prize” last year) and asked him to reverse it. So FIFA's Disciplinary Committee did and instead suspended the ban for a one-year “probationary period”. UEFA called it “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable”. Trump then confirmed the whole thing on camera with a run of quotes that included “I'm a person that loves sports and was a good athlete”, “I understand sports really well”, “This referee is a little bit suspect if you check his past” and the pièce de resistance of the whole video: “I didn’t know what the hell a red card was”. Anyway, Balogun played but Belgium won. USA are out of their own World Cup. Looking back at the whole thing, all Trump did was hand Belgium a damn good reason to want to win that went well beyond football. And Belgium stepped up; they played like a team that had been personally insulted by the tournament’s host country. The USA team, which should have been desperate being down a star striker and with everything on the line at a home World Cup, played like a side that had been told the rules would bend for them. It’s not a great mentality to take into a knockout match.

Eliza

Always and forever obsessed with anything Keke Palmer does, ngl. However, at this year’s BET Awards, she stole the show in true Keke Palmer fashion: walking into Druski’s hosting segment, taking the mic mid-sentence, and saying “This should have been my gig. Why the hell would they have you host?” before pivoting straight to Cardi B’s intro. Nobody, including BET, has confirmed whether it was scripted. A week later, it’s still the only highlight of the awards people are talking about. Keke’s hosting magic has always been her ability to be unapologetically herself and make entertainment well … entertaining.

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.

Run the tape: the David protein bar and its pound-of-flesh lawsuit, Bieber’s MacBook karaoke at Coachella, the Banksy unmasking, Pattie Gonia and her carabiners, Pocock and his beer, the Knicks and their cookie all present as six unrelated things we found interesting. But lined up they share a common thread, a question, if you will: does the product have to be good first or can the story carry it?

You already know the answer. At least we hope you do, if not we’re doing a horrible job of communicating the point in these issues.

The story carries what’s real and buckles under what isn’t.

Our celebrations of smart conversations over the past 12 months have really been an acknowledgement of the intelligent ways brands have endeavoured to amplify the good, not hide the bad (incidentally, an SKMG company value). David survived a lawsuit because the bar truly delivers – 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, zero sugar – before a dollar got spent on marketing. Bieber’s laptop set soared due to years of banked goodwill. Pocock can tell it how it is because there isn’t a millimetre of daylight between the man and the message.

This is the tenet we bore clients with daily. But end of financial year is for going back on time, so here we are: Act, Explain, Amplify.

Long-time readers know it as the format this newsletter ran on for years before we got cute and dropped it. What it actually is, and was first, is how we run the work: the spine of our retainers, the order we walk a client through a strategy, the thing we’d defend in a room full of people paying us to be right.

As it happens, a communications professional we greatly admire (and only discovered about a fortnight ago) has landed on the same concept tied to a much more palatable metaphor. Lulu Cheng Meservey ran comms at Substack and Activision and now tells anyone who will sit still that traditional PR is dead and founders/CEOs should speak for themselves. She tells clients to think like a kitchen. You cook a dish, then you plate it. The dish is what you actually do; the plating is how you serve it up. And – her line, not ours, though we’re furious we didn’t get there first – you can’t plate up shit.

Act speaks to the ingredients of the dish. It’s the produce but it’s also the concept and intent behind the thing you’re ultimately eating. Explain is the cooking: taking what you’ve got and putting the thing together for your audience. Amplify is the plating and serving. Good plating won’t rescue a bad dish, but a great dish survives clumsy plating and still gets eaten. Read: if the product ain’t good, no one’s lining up for a second serve. Lulu, if you’re reading, the cheque’s in the mail (please send a receipt apparently we’re supposed to keep them).

So, when it comes to Act, it’s not all that hard: good produce? Great meal. Simple. This is the reason heaps of Australians will bore you with the observation they’ve had better [insert foreign cuisine here] at home than in said meal’s country of origin. But before the cooking begins you need a good concept as much as a decent Harris Farm. That is, you need to clearly understand what it is you’re doing to walk the talk accordingly.

Meservey has a ladder for this part too: three tiers of story a company can tell, if your product, your action or your dish can deliver a satisfying answer for tier three, you’re onto a winner. Tier one is what you literally do: SpaceX builds rockets. Tier two is what that represents: SpaceX is dragging space flight back out of government hands. Tier three is the dent you leave if you win: SpaceX makes us multiplanetary. Don’t get caught mouthing tier three while you’re still fumbling tier one. Anyone can tell you about the dent they’re putting in the universe; far fewer can show you the rocket. The best communicators are in the kitchen early, making sure there’s a real dish – that the business does something worth the story – rather than getting handed a plate at the pass and told to make it sing. The David bar’s first job was to be a good bar. That call gets made in the test kitchen, long before any release, and no release could have made it.

Then you get to the cooking (what we call Explain). This is where most good things die of vagueness. The sharpest knife we picked up this year belongs to Harry Dry, who runs three questions over every line he writes: can you see it, can you falsify it, can nobody else say it? Three no’s and you’ve written rubbish. Three yeses and you’re cooking with gas.

In a recent episode of How I Write, Dry gives the example of a recruitment ad he clocked on the way to a meeting: “Don’t just get a job, change an entire industry”. Shut your eyes. Can you picture “change an entire industry”? Nope. True or false? Neither. Could a rival run the identical line tomorrow? Obviously. Now New Balance: “Worn by supermodels in London and dads in Ohio”. You can see both of them, the model and the dad at the barbecue. It’s true: supermodels do, dads do. And nobody else can say it, because the supermodels aren’t in Reebok and the dads aren’t in Prada. Start with the soul, end with the sell, as Dr Marcus Collins keeps telling us and we keep quoting, because he’s right. That’s cooking: a truer telling of what the dish already is.

Only then do you plate. Amplify is distribution. We won’t pretend channel doesn’t matter, the right plate is exactly why a niche running magazine could recontextualise Harry Styles when another late-night couch never would. But it’s the last move, it requires something Neil spent the entire meeting trying to land: consistency. You don’t plate once. You keep going past the novelty, past the point it stops being fun, past – his phrase, cleaned up for a family newsletter – the urge to be sick. Leave the cake in the oven longer than feels comfortable (thank you Mark Ritson for that one). The spark at the top counts for nothing if you bail at the first quiet week.

That brings us, eventually, to the noise of late. You may have noticed your LinkedIn feed spent the past few months discovering that comms is more than PR… A revelation that – perhaps most concerningly – seems to be mostly made by publicists beating their chests that publicity was never the whole job (while still listing publicist in their LinkedIn headline). There are posts, diagrams and the odd practitioner explaining at length and to applause that what they do is “Strategic” and not merely the issuing of media releases. No shit. We’ve been at this since issue one.

The job – Lulu again – is getting the story and the evidence right, which is Act and Explain doing their work long before anyone drafts a release. That stopped being a revelation around here a long time ago. We’re not sure it needs a parade.

It’s reached the mainstream now, mind. Katie Deighton wrote it up for The Wall Street Journal as “The Revenge of the Publicists: How Comms Execs Stormed the C-Suite” and measured the win the way the genre likes to, in org charts: nearly half of chief communications officers now report straight to the CEO, up from 37% a decade ago. Sure. But reporting lines and C-suite titles are a strange thing to wave around as proof you matter, and counting them out loud has the whiff of the kid who’s been bumped to the front seat and needs the whole street to see. The brands we work for couldn’t tell you who we report to. They can tell you whether anyone believes or listens to what they have to say.

So measure it where it actually shows up: in the dish, the story, whether the audience walks away believing what you are saying. Hand the comms people the plating and nothing else and you only ever get it at the pass, dish already set. Bring them into the kitchen – the strategy, the product call, the cooking, the plating, the slog of doing it again next week – and your comms partner earns their keep at every station instead of the last one.

That’s the year, reconciled, the same sentence on a loop since July: make something real, then we’ll talk about how to serve it.

Embarrassingly unglamorous, as these go. We don’t have a growth hack, nothing you could spin into a nine-slide carousel, just the oldest rule in any kitchen restated by us and a year of case studies. But, maybe that’s a refreshing change to the unsubstantiated hustle bros hocking their AI courses in your instagram feed right now (just us?).

Pity the reader who only ever gets the plating.

What we’re currently obsessed with

Neil

The phase mentioned above that Andrew cleaned up for a family newsletter was this: “push through the vomit”. Hardly shocking. It was the headline of this article in B&T, in which ad man Ben Lilley wrote about the Cannes ad festival presentation by celebrity marketing nerds Mark Ritson and Byron Sharp. Towards the end, the article talks about what Ritson said on the critical importance of consistency in all comms - paid, owned and earned. THAT is my obsession. If I had a dollar for every time I said marketers get sick of comms campaigns long before consumers do, I’d easily have enough for a first-class flight from Sydney to Nice, then a limo to Cannes (not the crazed Uber driver Sam and I had one year). As Ritson so colourfully put it, you need to push through the vomit and avoid change for the sake of change. Be consistent. Always. Don’t get bored or start scratching around for the next new thing. Deliver your message over and over again. That’s how I convinced journalists the Big Bash League in 2013 had one million viewers on Ten. It didn’t always… but that is an obsession for another issue.

Andrew

Here’s a sentence you may only read once in your life: This week I’ve had Alan Greenspan on the brain. Specifically thanks to John Cassidy reviving his New Yorker profile this week after Greenspan’s passing.

Cassidy’s picture of an all-singing, all-dancing chairman of the Fed is whimsical. Not something you typically expect regarding an ironclad pragmatist who spent 18 years at the most powerful economic lever on earth. And yet for all his brilliance, Greenspan’s unwavering faith in the invisible hand still led to that market crash in 2008. Even if he had left the role two years prior, Greenspan himself confessed to learning a lot from that. The piece leaves you with an ominous feeling the rest of us didn’t, at least if the market politics of today are anything to go by.

Tess

My obsession this week is the New York Times article on the UK’s “Hot Podium Guy”, Tobias Gough, the Downing Street staff member whose job is to wheel out the lectern and microphone before major announcements by the Prime Minister. Anyone who’s followed British politics over the past decade knows Westminster has been an absolute circus, but through prime ministers, resignations, scandals and snap announcements, Tobias has been the one constant, calmly setting up the podium.

The fact he’s become a genuine cultural icon is just so funny to me. Katie Glass from The Times described him as “the one reliable man in politics” and a mix between “a choirboy and a Chippendale”. Others have nicknamed him the “harbinger of doom”, because the moment he appears, everyone assumes someone’s about to resign.

It’s such a brilliantly British story. After years of political chaos, the only truly trusted figure in Westminster is the bloke who plugs in the microphone.

Sam

Mexican Batman.
Let me say that again: Mexican Batman.

Over in Jalisco, Mexico, there’s an unidentified person hunting down motorcycle thieves at night, duct-taping them to lampposts and leaving the stolen bikes beside them with signs detailing their crimes. Five men in 10 days (so far). It’s some vigilante shit and wholly deserving of the moniker. Police, for the record, are treating the taped-up men as victims and are now actively looking for the vigilante… which I guess is legally correct but it’s narratively devastating. Reminder that this is the same state that’s hosting FIFA World Cup matches and dealing with cartel violence, so I do love the idea that a guy with a roll of duct tape is making news and winning the public over. Even if it’s not a good legal framework, he is doing something. And surely you’ve read enough COMMPRESS issues to know that the person who acts immediately, visibly and even imperfectly often wins the narrative.

Eliza

Can I talk about Charli XCX yet? This weekend, she released Wink Wink, the third single from her upcoming new album Music, Fashion, Film, already drawing criticism and flop predictions after the cultural phenomenon of BRAT. In Rolling Stone, Charli framed the pivot not as a defence but as the point. “All of my albums work in opposites,” she said. “They repel against each other, and that's the connective tissue.” She could have made BRAT 2, the safe, commercial move she has called “painfully borinG”. Instead, her consistency is refusal: not a repeatable sound, but a commitment to never making the same record twice or chasing a high that was beyond her and her management’s control. That only works because her fans have already bought into her as a continuous, evolving artist rather than a fixed product – I fear the whole point of The Moment.

Catherine Jia is the co-founder of sustainable fashion marketplace Mei Mei Market, a digital creator with 27,000+ followers (@project.catherine), and a consultant in the construction and building industry. She is doing all three all at once but only has a screen time of two hours a day, which, frankly, we find confronting.

Her MediaDiet paints a very calm picture. This is someone who moves at their own pace and that pace may make you, dear reader, feel like your life is chaotic. It probably is. Catherine meditates to the same YouTube video every morning and has done for two years running. She finishes work early because she refuses to have too many tabs open at once. The main thing she and her husband send each other throughout the day are posts about cats because they are, in Catherine’s words, obsessed.

Honestly, we’re still processing the two hours stat. While we continue to do so, you should dive on in.

Wake up

I do reach for my phone first thing in the morning, but only to play my favourite YouTube meditation. For the past two years, it’s been Lavendaire’s 10 Minute Guided Meditation for Positive Energy, Peace & Light. Taking those few moments to slow down helps me feel calm, grounded and more present for the rest of the day.

Morning

I usually work from home, so I spend about an hour in the morning getting ready before sitting at my desk. I start with a freshly cooked warm breakfast, then do a few chores, get ready and ease into the day with a matcha and some journaling before logging into my laptop. If it’s not music I’m listening to while getting ready, then I’m tuning in to my fave podcast, Culture Club hosted by Jasmine Wallis and Maggie Zhou.

Afternoon

When I work from home, I don’t like having too many tabs open because it clutters my brain. I prefer to focus on one task at a time to stay efficient and usually finish work earlier in the day. Last year, my best friend Rena Zheng and I launched Mei Mei Market, combining our shared passion for sustainability in fashion, curating a marketplace of sustainable pieces. A lot of the inspiration behind Mei Mei Market comes from our own experiences growing up in Australian Chinese families and wanting to create a space that celebrates culture, creativity and connection.

I’m quite intentional with my time, so I don’t really doomscroll during the day. I’ll pick up my phone here and there to check TikTok or Instagram – either checking out Fashion Journal Magazine or what @copingwithus has to offer – but most of the time I stay focused.

My husband and I also send each other posts throughout the day, mostly cat posts because we are obsessed with cats!! We love our two lil fur babies at home, Izumi and Tofu.

Evening

In the evenings, I like to switch my brain off and let it rest rather than think too much. I usually watch calming YouTube vlogs; my favourites are Weylie Hoang and Art of Anna. It helps me unwind and consume content lightly without needing to retain too much information, which makes it easier for me to relax at the end of the day.

Catherine Jia’s Picks & Recs

SCREEN TIME: 2 hours

SUBSCRIBED TO: Mei Mei Market

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO READ: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO: SOFT GIRL SUMMER by Sailorr

AN UNEXPECTED GOOGLE SEARCH: “Mongolian horseback riding trip”

A LINK WORTH FORWARDING: https://www.wgsn.com/en/blog/key-colours-w-26-27

INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT I’M LOVING RIGHT NOW: @table.sogeum

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 scoreboard, briefly: $US118 million worldwide in its opening week, the biggest original-horror debut in history, directed by a 20-year-old who couldn’t legally drink at his own premiere, and A24’s highest-grossing film full stop. One spot down sat Curry Barker’s Obsession, now Focus Features’ biggest film ever. And below them both: The Mandalorian and Grogu, a $US165 million Star Wars film dropping into third place behind two YouTubers whose combined budgets wouldn’t cover Grogu’s ears.

We’d call that a preference being expressed, and while wunderkind profiles are being written left right and centre, we would like to direct your attention toward what Backrooms’ opening week did to the industry’s definition of a safe bet. (The movie’s worldwide haul is now nudging $US300 million.)

Hollywood’s risk equation has remained reasonably stagnant for 20 years: originality is a gamble and pre-awareness is insurance. This is how you justify spending $US165 million on yet another movie based on a property that has been loved, sequelled, spun off and merchandised for half a century. On paper, Backrooms is the same wager: it’s still adapted IP with a built-in audience. The difference is where the IP was sourced: a live community still adding to the canon the weekend the film opened.

This has asserted its dominance as a safer investment at a fraction of the price, because by the time A24 committed to anything, the property had been concept-testing itself on the internet for years.

It helps that the founding text was built to spread. The whole canon of the Backrooms descends from one stolen-looking photo and an anonymous caption shorter than most brand purpose statements. It gives a setting, a way in (you “noclip out of bounds in reality”, gamer shorthand for falling through the world’s geometry), a complete sensory palette and a threat it declines to describe, then stops. Everything a screenwriting manual would call as missing gave the original Backrooms creepypasta its legs. This is the sort of lore-building 4chan flocks to. Thousands did, and one of them was a 16-year-old with a month of spare time in Blender. Organisations have a shocking tendency to smooth every ambiguity out of their messaging and wonder why nobody repeats it: a message you can add to is a message you will pass on.

What A24 did with all this was mostly a matter of restraint. The February 2023 announcement with Kane Parsons, the teenager who built the lore’s most-watched corner, holding the camera pre-empted the ritual backlash that greets every studio raid on a fandom. It turned three years of production into three years of coverage on a media spend of zero. The paid work, when it finally came, was apt: blue-taped doorways in subway stations with no title and no date, performers in Async hazmat suits taping off the real-world location Parsons recreated in his first upload, a fake ad for “Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire” with a small A24 logo in the corner. ARGNet, dormant since the alternate-reality-game heyday it was built to chronicle, came back from the dead to cover it. None of it explained anything to outsiders. The initiated did the explaining for free, in their own words, to audiences who trust them more than they would ever trust a trailer.

Dr Marcus Collins ran digital strategy for Beyoncé, built her a handsome official fan community, and proceeded to watch his Beyentourage sit nearly empty while the Beyhive organised itself elsewhere using its own language, rituals and enforcement arm. The conclusion Collins reached, and later built For the Culture around: “We were looking for fans when we should have been looking for believers.” You can’t build the hive and you can’t buy it. You can only find it, feed it and stay out of its way, which is a near-exact description of the Backrooms campaign. A24 bought a house of collectively built canon with thousands of contributors and resisted the urge to renovate it.

Sony’s Slender Man, in its glorious ineptitude, actually proves this point better than the good example above. The studio licensed a wildly popular creepypasta monster and still scored a 7%-on-Rotten-Tomatoes film. How? They treated it as buying a name versus buying the right to talk to the community that made that name famous.

Long-time readers can file this as a kick-on from our Heartbreak High issue, where the lesson was that inside jokes work as invitations and you don’t water down identity to court a wider audience. Heartbreak High did it with shoeys and menty Bs; Backrooms does it with blue tape and hum-buzz. In both cases, the niche did the work, but maybe more importantly, the people who didn’t get the references followed the people who did. It’s just like high school really. If you heard the cool older kids talking about something you hadn’t heard of, you wouldn’t bail them up and ask about it, you’d run home to your computer to learn everything you can before dropping a casual ref at lunch the next day to signal you’re cool too and that you’ve always been cool.

The timing of all this is no accident either: horror booms when economies wobble. Psychologists call it benign masochism: paying to rehearse dread in a room with exits. This particular dread is an infinite beige office that Gen Z finance TikTok has spent years interpreting as capitalist alienation. Severance is a solid example of the same aesthetic, albeit written for a different audience.

None of this is original. Backrooms is an adaptation of a photograph of a hobby store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and yet it is also the freshest thing in cinemas. Originality was never really the variable, sourcing is. In the 1970s, Fox grudgingly spent about $US11 million on a space western a young director had stitched together from Kurosawa, Flash Gordon serials and old dogfight footage, and the studio had so little faith in it that it let him keep the merchandising. The fans did a real number on that one (yes, we’re talking about Star Wars). The archive Disney now routinely reheats began as the cheap, weird, borrowed thing that a community fell in love with and carried. Kind of like tacos al pastor. We’re hungry.

Give it half a century and someone will pay millions of dollars to reheat the Backrooms too, but the conversation will have moved to a different corner of the internet (or whatever we’re using then). That’s where you’ll find a better investment every time.

What we’re currently obsessed with

Andrew

This build on W. David Marx’s Blank Space from Adam Mastroianni. I finished the original last month and while it was a fun romp through a particular strain of nostalgic US cultural history, I was a little disappointed by it being riddled with AI truisms and making the same sort of points Brad Troemel, Joshua Citarella and even this Substack have made before. This is coming from a big fan of Marx too. Mastroianni has managed to fill what I’m now realising was the – oh God, I’m gonna say it – blank space that Marx left in his own work: a real, working sociological theory backed by research as to the broader patterns that allowed something like poptimism to occur in the first place.

I promise you’ll see it referenced at least four times in future COMMPRESS issues.

Neil

I haven’t seen Obsession yet, but I have become obsessed with something I learnt from a Rolling Stone article. Curry Barker was inspired by a segment in a 1991 episode of The Simpsons that played on W.W. Jacobs’ 1902 short story about a severed simian hand with supernatural powers (the episode was Treehouse of Horror II, but we all knew that, right?). The short story has inspired plays, multiple films, TV shows, even an opera, proving – once again – that there are only seven story plotlines in the world and everything is a variation on one of them. Don’t believe me? Read Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. OK, I’ll save you some time. The plots are Overcoming The Monster, Rags To Riches, The Quest, Voyage And Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Rebirth.

Eliza

Season 3 of America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders landed on Netflix this month, and I spent this past weekend immersed in Texas, glitz and glam. But this season's real subject isn't choreography, it's the cost of global fame for the women performing it. Veteran Reece says it plainly, “As much positivity as I receive, there's also loads of negativity”, a reality that led the fan favourite into retirement two years earlier than expected. The series has confronted online hate before, including a stalker tracking a teammate’s car with an AirTag. Now, as Netflix expands the team’s visibility, recruiters are looking further afield, even finding Perth local Faith for a rookie season. Social media is a great tool to build visibility and community, but its impact cuts both ways. I’ve been hearing the term “parasocialism” more often: the one-sided closeness audiences feel with people they have never met. Having a following does not create clear boundaries between admiration and intrusion. Audience growth and duty of care should not be planned separately. Social media is here to stay, so safety needs to be built into the business strategy from the beginning.

Tess

My obsession this week: I’ve somehow landed on the side of TikTok that’s obsessed with John Kiriakou, the disgraced former CIA officer. Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison in 2013 after pleading guilty to disclosing the identity of a covert CIA officer. Many, however, believe he was really punished for blowing the whistle on America’s torture program. These days, he seems to move from podcast to podcast (and makes a fortune on Cameo), but he is a fantastic storyteller. Yes, the stories themselves from his days in the CIA are fascinating, but it’s the way he tells them. He gives just the right amount of detail and, for me, tells the story at the right speed.

From a communications perspective, it’s an interesting case study. Plenty of people think he’s a fraud and that some of his stories are exaggerated or outright fabricated. But whether they’re true or not, there seems to be one point of agreement: he’s an exceptional storyteller and a reminder that, in the battle for attention, how you tell a story can sometimes matter as much as the story itself.

Sam

Guilds. At a drinks on Sunday, a friend made the comment that “there just aren’t enough guilds anymore” and I can’t help but think that they’re right. What happened to all the guilds? You’ve got the Screen Actors Guild in the US, sure (although last year it rebranded the SAG Awards as the Actor Awards Presented by SAG-AFTRA). The Writers Guild of America had that massive strike in 2023 that shut down Hollywood. The Elder Scrolls games have the Fighters and Mages Guilds… but beyond that?? Seems like a missed opportunity for someone with prowess and means to start one of their own. I’ll join you. Anyway, I’m now deep in a rabbit hole reading about medieval guild halls and trade monopolies in 14th-century Florence.

New York reinvents itself for a living: the neighbourhoods turn over by the season and new people arrive with an “if I can make it here, I can make it anywhere” glint in their eye every day. The restaurant scene chases trend after trend off a cliff on the weekly. And yet, in spite of this, the place keeps a small pantheon of icons it stays fierce about: the water towers, the ambient hostility, the black-and-white cookie… the Knicks. The city is fierce about its icons but not precious. Consider the cookie: a half-vanilla, half-chocolate hubcap that has remained structurally unchanged since the delis that sell it had different grandparents behind the register, but gets its icing repainted for the occasion. Green for St Patrick’s Day, rainbow for Pride, blue-and-white for Hanukkah, it’s a billboard the whole city reads to know what’s going on.

So a cookie turning orange and blue seems, in itself, like a non-event. The cookie turns some colour most months. What made June 2026 different was that every last one of them turned at the same time. Russ & Daughters and Zabar’s did it as willingly as the no-name corner spots. And it didn’t stop there. Bagels also went orange and blue, catered in by the trayful at offices that have never shown a flicker of team spirit in their lives. Half the bakeries in the most cynical city on the planet independently decided, in the same week, to recolour a 100-year-old product as though a sort of omnipotent creative agency with Cannes Lions lighting up its eyes had coordinated them in symphony. The skyline backed them up. The Empire State Building is normally the one mast the city checks to learn what the day means; this past week it was every big building in town lit orange and blue. All it took was a basketball franchise that has more frequently found itself the butt of a 1990s rom-com joke than a participant in the playoffs.

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? Answer that one honestly and you’re surprisingly far down the rabbit hole of a more existential quandary: how you make anybody give a single solitary shit about something they’ve already decided to ignore. The climate, say (we will get there).

Action replay: 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. Two nights later, Jalen Brunson, a second-round pick scouts wrote off as too short and too slow, dropped 45 to close it out and took Finals MVP. But you knew that.

Off the court, things got properly stupid in the best possible way. One of us – occasional SKMG New York correspondent Samantha Hillman – spent championship night out on the streets and rang a decidedly excited but Sydney-bound Andrew Knowles, two hours after the final bucket and still surrounded by streets full of screaming New Yorkers. None of what she described came from a marketing department. The Knicks won New York from the bottom up, a mosaic of a few million people each making their own tiny version of the same story.

A DoorDash truck drove the boroughs with a basketball hoop bolted to the back, parking outside schools at pickup time so kids could take a shot. Towers across the skyline lit up in team colours, a handful at first, then nearly all of them as the series tightened. The Empire State Building was lit up, but it often is. This time, the entire Manhattan skyline went blue and orange. It was one heck of a sight.

New York Lottery reportedly got more than 13,000 retailers to switch off their lottery signs, on the logic that the city had only one dream worth playing for. An MTA bus driver pulled over mid-route, opened the doors and got out to dance with the crowd. NYC Mayor Mamdani signed an actual executive order repealing bedtime for the length of the Finals run and let the kids in the room co-sign it in pen and palm-print. Abyssinian Baptist, the historic Harlem church, folded a Knicks hook into Sunday service, set, with a straight face, to a Jay-Z song that contains the line “Jesus can’t save you, life starts when the church ends”.

Before Game 4, the one the Knicks would win, a man in a chambray shirt who looked like your most boring friend’s boyfriend went viral to the tune of half a million likes for padding around outside the Garden calmly burning sage, energy-healing the vibe. Forget the Etsy witches; the regular dudes had it handled. When the Knicks stormed back from 29 down a few hours later, the internet reached a unanimous verdict: the sage worked. A two-year-old was filmed toddling up to grown adults in Knicks caps to inform them, gravely, “go Knicks”. People signed off work emails with the team’s name. The first line of every Zoom call stopped being the weather and became Where did you watch it in the same fashion as Where were you when, except nobody died.

On the streets of New York right now, you catch yourself waving at total strangers because they’ve got the cap on (everyone has a Knicks cap on), a nod, a grin, the flicker you’d give a mate across a bar, spent on people you’ll never see again. The internet has flooded with beguiled New Yorkers reporting the symptoms like a mystery illness: a neighbour who smiled on his way to work (“I was so confused”), a driver who sat through a green light and copped not one honk, people in Knicks jerseys ambushed by kindness from strangers. People have been known to pass comment – and there is no graver insult in the New York lexicon – that it feels like “We’re the South now”. None of which made the place saintly: a few Spurs jerseys got jumped, the odd bus went up. But the baseline setting, for once, was warmth.

A wine bar started the run insisting it wouldn’t show the games – come for a drink after, very chic, no screens – then folded inside a week, propped an iPad behind the bar, and by the following week had installed an actual projector. The falafel place had it on. The natural-wine spot you’d swear wasn’t watching had it on. The bar that does not show sport, the one a block from a packed sports bar, broke down and bought a television. Showing the game or not showing the game had become the entire question of whether you wanted customers.

The culture-jack is a known vibe-murderer too many brands have been all too fond of: the second a falafel shop and a delivery app and a state lottery all turn up to move units off your fun, the fun curdles. Not this time. Everyone piled in and the thing somehow got better, because everyone piling in was adding to it instead of undermining it. The hoop bolted to the truck handed kids something as did the blue-and-orange cookie. Turning up to a party with a gift is a far cry from gatecrashing it to flog merch from the back of a truck. The businesses that stayed dark turned conspicuous, their silence suddenly loud and a bit suss. Once culture runs this hot, sitting it out becomes its own loud position.

The one device the Knicks themselves can take credit for is the oldest going: they made a 53-year deficit the story and let the streets do the rest. The broadcast leaned on it without mercy. One game opened on a full screen of facts that some poor line producer or researcher clearly bled over: roughly 69% of New Yorkers weren’t born the last time the team won, that not one player on the current roster was alive in 1973, that whole generations of this city were born, grew up and reached middle age without ever once seeing a championship. Anyone on the fence fell clean off it. Between games they kept dragging the old Knicks of the 1970s into the good seats, white-haired men screaming advice from the baseline with the current players climbing up into the stands to find them after the final whistle: This is yours, you got us here.

It helped that the team itself was a New York parable in shorts. Jalen Brunson overlooked and undersized; Josh Hart playing through everything short of amputation; a roster a thousand people independently called blue collar, in a town that flatters itself the same way. Then there was this subplot: Brunson beat the Spurs in five games for the title, while his father Rick who lost to those same Spurs in five games, as a Knick in the 1999 Finals, watched from his son’s coaching staff. Twenty-seven years, 4–1 then and 4–1 now, the boy finishing the father’s story against the same franchise. And the bit A$AP got to first: you do not support the Knicks, you are the Knicks. “Knickerbocker” is the old word for a New Yorker, a Dutch surname carried by 17th-century settlers, made famous when Washington Irving published his satirical 1809 History of New York under the invented byline Diedrich Knickerbocker. It came to mean a New Yorker of old Dutch stock, then any New Yorker at all, and along the way it named the knee-length britches those settlers wore. The franchise borrowed the city’s oldest nickname for itself in 1946. Rooting for them is, etymologically, rooting for the idea of being from here.

One of us turned four separate friends into Knicks fans this season, single-handed, each by a completely different pitch. The cultural moment for one friend, the where-were-you-when stakes. The historical-significance lecture for another. That’s why a city of mutually suspicious tribes could all claim the same team without a single one of them feeling sold to. The streetwear designers, the livestreamers, the Pride crossover, the foodies, the finance bros, the Dominicans, the Bushwick artists and the Staten Island Italians, each got a version cut to fit, and each thought they’d discovered it themselves.

Taken from someone who’s spent the better part of a decade in this city (Samantha Hillman), it couldn’t have come at a better time. Morale here has been scraping the floor. Every second conversation lately is a friend decamping to Miami. Rent is past the point of feasibility, the same five shops cloned into every neighbourhood, the local subreddit insisting the city died in 2001, or 2019, or whenever the poster happened to move here. The last time the place felt this unified was during pandemic, and that one wasn’t a party. Mamdani caught it exactly: this kind of coming-together, he said, usually shows up in a moment of tragedy, and here it was turning up in a moment of joy. The whole city shrinking, for a week, to the size of a small town. Émile Durkheim had a drier name for it a century back: collective effervescence, the charge that runs through a crowd the instant it stops being a room full of separate people. A mayor can’t conjure that alone, and half the city was never his anyway. The Knicks were the first thing in years every faction could stand inside at once. A city told on a loop that its best days were behind it could, for one weekend, believe the opposite and you could feel the relief come up off the pavement. Online, people kept trying to date the feeling: November 2008 sun, February 2020 moon, June 2016 rising.

Now, here comes the bit where we turn a basketball game into a TED talk. To crown oneself the title of “storyteller”, as PR people increasingly tend to do, just feels like a bit of a horrendous wank. And yet, stories themselves are the single most powerful device we have to persuade audiences. Robert Cialdini, who more or less wrote the book on persuasion, keeps landing on metaphor as the most powerful meaning-maker we own; wind back 2,500 years and Aesop‘s already loading a moral into a tortoise, because “be persistent” goes in one ear and a hare asleep under a tree stays for life. We’ve invented nothing since – not the dashboard or the deck – that beats a story for getting an idea to lodge in a human skull.

The line people wave off as a fridge magnet, If you can’t see it you can’t be it, is load-bearing. You cannot want a future you are unable to picture. A New Yorker born in 1990 had no lived image of the Knicks as champions, and this month they were handed one, and now it exists and cannot be un-seen. That is the whole trick, and it is the trick almost everything serious keeps fumbling.

Consider something that actively resists translation, an issue that arrives pre-loaded with ideological apathy before you’ve finished a sentence. Climate, say, where there’s maybe 20 years on the clock to get things right and the capital is already moving regardless of how anyone feels about it. Complexity is the obvious culprit and the wrong one; plenty of complex things land fine. What sinks these issues is apathy, plus the fact that so many people working in complex fields have only ever been inside that field, so they reach for the one register they trust.

Climate communication leads, almost always, with features: percentage increases, accords, emissions targets, basis points and 1.5 degrees. All true, all important, and all completely inert as a reason for an actual person to stand out in the rain and care. Start with the soul, end with the sell (thank you once again Dr Marcus Collins). The sector opens with the sell, doubles down on the sell, then commissions a stakeholder report wondering why nobody fell in love.

Elaine Scarry has a book, Thinking in an Emergency, that gets at why this fails worse than it should. We assume an emergency switches off thought. What actually happens is you drop back onto whatever is already grooved into you, the inlaid reflex. Someone opens a door, a mouse runs out, and they shriek “A mouse!” before standing there baffled, because they aren’t remotely afraid of mice. The fear was installed in childhood and fired without asking. Tell a society it’s in a climate emergency and it does precisely that: defaults to the reflexes already in the room, which are apathy and the same capitalist models that built the problem. Without a better story, a sharper metaphor, a picture of what the far side could look like, the reflex wins every single time.

And the economic argument has already been won, which makes the whole failure dafter. The unit cost of electrification has dropped below fossil fuels; capital is repricing fast, more so since Hormuz. Texas is the biggest renewable-energy state in the US, run by people who voted for Trump and wouldn’t be caught dead believing in climate change. The thing got built because it was cheaper and better business, with the ideology stripped clean out. Make the case in lower bills and energy you actually control, drop the politics, and the fight half-dissolves. The Knicks trick again.

The critic Mark Fisher popularised a phrase he took from Franco Berardi: the slow cancellation of the future. The argument, roughly, is that the further into entrenched neoliberalism the West has travelled since the 1980s, the worse we’ve become at imagining any future that looks radically different and better. Our science fiction curdled into dystopia, and the dystopias crept closer in time. The catastrophe that used to sit a 100 years out now set 15 years from Tuesday. We can render the drowned city in photoreal 8K. Ask us to picture a good 2055 and we go vague, or twee, or silent. Fisher goes further: we may no longer be capable of it, as the muscle for imagining a future outside our current models has simply wasted away. In that void, you get apathy, the same flat resignation New York wore about the Knicks for 53 years: why hope, we never win.

Picture a New Yorker 18 months ago asked to imagine the Knicks as champions and the entire city weeping together in the street. Fantasy. Couldn’t be pictured, therefore couldn’t be wanted, therefore why bother? Then somebody seeded the possibility, the team made it real, and a city’s whole sense of itself flipped faster than that Game 3 comeback. If a positive story can move a culture that fast over a basketball team, the leap to who could envisage us getting the climate right is a big one, sure, but it requires the same muscle. The work is to hand people a future worth wanting, in terms they can see and hold and repeat to a friend over a drink.

New York spent 53 years unable to picture itself winning. Then it did, and the picture rewrote the city in a weekend. In 30 years of emissions charts, no one has yet thought to make the cookie orange and blue.

What we’re currently obsessed with

Neil

So, I had a random thought while this issue was being written: what was the #1 single in Australia when the Knicks last won the championship. It was Tony Orlando and Dawn’s Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree, a classic story song about a guy who has been released from prison and asks his girlfriend to tie a yellow ribbon around an oak tree if she wants him back. When he gets to her place, she has tied 100 yellow ribbons around the tree and everyone on the bus he arrived in cheers. You had to be there, but the song was HUGE in 1973, so big people thought it was about people returning from the Vietnam War (that dominated everyone’s thinking at the time). It’s a very long bow, but the people cheering when they saw 100 yellow ribbons and NYC being soaked in blue and orange are kinda in the same wheelhouse. Times are really tough. Anxiety is high. People want a reason to celebrate as a group. (Footnote: the song was offered to Ringo Starr, who rejected it, dismissing it as “ridiculous”.)

Sam

JFK’s only grandson, Jack Schlossberg. For those not keeping up at home, his arc over the past two or so years has been real interesting. He’s built a social following of near two million people posting unhinged videos and TikToks (which first caught my attention) doing things like impersonating Melania in a blonde wig, asking who is hotter than his own grandmother Jackie O, calling himself a silly goose, mocking his own cousin RFK Jr.’s voice disorder and, well, doing things that have an air of old Matty Healy about them. Then, almost overnight, his whole shtick tightened: Vogue made him their political correspondent, and he spoke at the DNC. He’s since announced a congressional bid for Manhattan’s 12th District (the seat Jerry Nadler’s vacating after 17 terms) and his shitposting has pivoted to policy explainers, Substack interviews with Katie Couric, Alyson Krueger, an NPR profile, CBS, and a campaign built around housing costs, tariffs and food prices. Nancy Pelosi has even endorsed him. His social media presence is still there but it’s more disciplined, aimed squarely at younger voters who actually engage with politics through those channels. Regardless of whether you think he’s the real deal or a Kennedy nepo baby, I think his pivot to a serious congressional candidate is almost at a Disney kid level of growing up in public. The primary’s next week. Let’s see if it all pays off.

Andrew

Siegelman Stable.

You can spend a fortune buying your way onto a championship, or you can spend years becoming the thing the champ reaches for. It actually kind of leaves me bereft that this has stayed such a sleeper hit of the Knicks’ comeback story, but the way this brand has developed as an IYKYK piece of Knicks iconography is the sort of brand story building that really gets me fanatical. Max Siegelman started by making hats by hand to represent his New York family’s horse racing stable, Jalen Brunson’s mum fronted one of the brand’s first campaigns. The MVP himself has been rocking the caps for years. Far from leaning on being at the right place at the right time, the brand leant in hard to the orange and blue over the season and sent the team whatever they wanted. Now it’s got the sort of authentic Knicks affiliation Nike wishes they could buy and it barely cost them a thing.

Eliza

I have to admit, I’m not a big basketball fan (no surprise there), so instead I’ll take this opportunity to discuss what’s really taking place in my frontal lobe – Love Island UK. Love Island is back, and so is my complete inability to look away. Season 13 is barely three weeks old, and maybe they have a new production direction because it’s clearly chaos on purpose, with drama from day one and constant format twists. Love Island has always understood something some TV types are still catching up on: audiences don’t want to watch, they want to participate. They analyse, vote, decide who deserves to win, and drive contestant narratives before the producers even get a chance to. The show doesn’t lead, the audience does. Never thought I’d say it, but the show that once asked “Is Essex a continent?” might be a masterclass in audience engagement. The producers have built a machine that taps directly into what people actually crave: connection, reaction, and a stake in the outcome. Give your audience something to feel, and they’ll do the heavy lifting for you.

Strap in for one of the most unique “day-in-the-life-of” diaries we’ve published.

This week the MediaDiet communiqué shines directly on Cameron Gibson: the brains behind renowned @slaggybookclub Instagram account (15,000-plus followers and growing fast), literary influencer and first-rate bookseller and buyer.

On any given day she will despise her alarm, drink a drink somewhere between coffee and hot chocolate, post a story that we are hesitant to share in a professional newsletter (if you can call us that), let 50 or so songs blur into the background of her psyche, win at trivia and end up on her bedroom floor thumb-deep into a doomscroll so bad it takes an intervention from Jesus himself to break free. Then she will pick up the new novel she’s been reading between every moment above and turn a new page like nothing has happened.

This is Cameron’s average day.

Let’s see what she recommends.

Wake up

Birdsounds trickle from my iPhone’s speakers at 6.30am. Despite their objective calm, I am offensively jolted into consciousness; my psyche has learned to abhor the sound. I poke at the screen until they stop.

I make a large mug of instant coffee + Milo (mocha?) and return to bed. Slow starts are important to me. I am not a runner. I crack open a new book: Wifehouse by Sonya Walger. A novel by an actor who was in Lost, apparently; I never got past season 2. Last night I also started a new book, but 20 pages were enough. It was not for me.

My phone vibrates, as an app tells me it’s time to stretch. I ignore it. I really should move my body more. My thumb’s muscle memory swipes through the pages of my homescreen but my apps are still locked. I’ll have to tap the NFC tag in the kitchen before I can check my emails or Instagram.

Morning

Bread in the toaster, I tap my phone against a shelf with an NFC tag and open Instagram for a brief scroll. Melissa Broder has posted something about her new book: an updated tier ranking of pussy eating featured in her works. I share it to my stories.

Back in my room I scroll through the “latest episodes” tab on the podcast app. Hit play on 7am and listen to reporter Ruby Jones and Prof. Sharon Lewin discuss the world’s increasing vulnerability to new pandemics while I apply layers of concealer and blush to my skin.

My shamefully short drive to work allows just enough time to listen to The Daily Aus’ headlines. Politics, war, cost of living.

Afternoon

Arrive at the bookshop, hit play on a new artist’s Spotify radio, try to switch things up. Alas, Olivia Dean plays. The shop is busy. I do not touch my phone. The playlist starts again. The same 50 songs grate through the Sonos like white noise.

I spend my lunch break back with Wifehouse, its lovely cover staring up at me as I scroll my emails. A new Substack from , an old uni classmate and the only subscription I’ll always stop to read. Her words tug at my heartstrings.

Evening

Triple J’s Abby & Tyrone drive me home. Debrief with the housemates. Another brief scroll of Instagram: Mel from @spiltwinebookclub is wrapping up her May reads, catching up on everything @katenevs has eaten, Justin Bieber is singing happy birthday to someone in a Mexican restaurant. So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings is stuck in my head. Can’t deal. Post a book rec then jump back in the car with Abby & Tyrone, head to trivia. Win. The late school night is worth it.

I should be washing my face, brushing my teeth, but I’m sat on my bedroom floor scrolling Insta again: my post has low engagement, a girl from high school got married in a beautiful dress, I’m attempting to sleuth and decipher some drama. I’m stuck in a dopamine-fuelled doomscroll. This happens, hence the NFC tag. Eventually, I will myself to swipe up, up, up and lock the apps. It’s too late to read, I should sleep. I pick up Wifehouse anyway.

Cameron’s Picks & Recs

SCREEN TIME: 3 hours, 20 minutes

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO READ: Offseason by Avigayl Sharp

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO: So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings - Caroline Polachek

AN UNEXPECTED GOOGLE SEARCH: “Befine foreboding”, “Best supermarket olive oil?”

INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT I’M LOVING RIGHT NOW: @usingmyphd

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

Two parties are in a fight neither of them can afford to be seen winning. One is a billion-dollar outdoor brand that gave itself away to save the Earth and would now very much like someone to stop selling rainbow t-shirts with a logo that looks a bit (or a lot, depending on your point of view) like theirs. The other is a drag queen in hiking boots and carabiner earrings who has raised the better part of $US4 million for the planet and would now very much like you to know she is being crushed by a big corporation that is built on doing good. They agree on most things, but they are suing each other anyway.

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

*chaos ensues*

Accordingly, we decided to get a little novel with it, y’know mix up the format or whatever. We split the table(s) down the middle, gave each half one side of the argument, banned them from reading the other side’s evidence (no one stuck to that rule) and went for it. The brief was simple: forget who would win in a courtroom and work out who is winning the argument, live, in public, right now, while the lawyers pretend the whole thing is sub judice.

The next 42 minutes saw four grown adults and Neil bickering about trademark dilution, cheese sandwiches and whether you are supposed to want to take a drag queen out for a nice dinner. Pity the reader. Pity us. Let’s get into it.

First, who you’re dealing with.

Pattie Gonia is the drag persona of Wyn Wiley, a photographer from Lincoln, Nebraska, who put on heels in the backcountry in 2018 and went viral doing it. Since then the character has become a serious force: co-founder of the environmental not-for-profit The Outdoorist Oath, $US3.7 million raised for environmental and social-justice causes, a TIME Next Generation Leader, more than two million followers, and a 100-mile trek in full drag last December that pulled in $US1.1 million. The name is a pun. The boots are real. The carabiners are, as Andrew put it, “clearly leveraging the brand”, which is sort of the whole point of a pun.

Patagonia is the company you know, or you think you do. Yvon Chouinard started it because he was annoyed that his climbing gear kept breaking. In 2022 he gave the entire thing away – roughly a $US3 billion company – to a trust and a not-for-profit so that all profit goes to fighting climate change. “Earth is now our only shareholder,” the media release said and everyone in comms filed it away as the single best purpose brand move of the decade.

Pattie had a 2022 understanding with Patagonia about how the name could be used. In late 2024 she started selling “Pattie Gonia”-branded merch, some of it using versions of the Patagonia logo. In September 2025 she filed a trademark application to lock in exclusive rights to “Pattie Gonia” across clothing, apparel, activism and endorsements. In January 2026 Patagonia sued, for the grand sum of $US1 plus legal fees, citing the “near-copy” name as a “long-term threat”. Late last month, both of them took the fight to social media.

Right. Corners, please.

In the rainbow corner: Neil, Tess and Sam, for the queen. In the blue corner: Andrew and Eliza, for the brand. Neil opened and didn’t bother warming up.

“This was never purely a trademark issue,” he said. “Patagonia is hiding behind the infringement. They just want Pattie Gonia to stop using anything that relates to their brand.” He’d grant them exactly one point – “stop using their logos, that’s fair” – and torched the rest as “completely over the top”. Patagonia, he insisted, wanted to stop the Pattie Gonia brand stone cold.

Andrew understood the concept of parody but argued the timing: “She has a completely valid point that the spirit of drag is pun and parody, and she’s a card-carrying climate activist. But she’s now trying to leverage off a brand that isn’t hers, regardless of intent, to make money.” The tell, for him, is that 2022 understanding. Pattie says it “wasn’t a broad agreement about my future”. Fine, Andrew said, but it proves the brand knew exactly what she was doing for years and let her run, right up until she filed to trademark their name and sell products under it. “That’s a very different thing.”

So Team Pattie stopped defending the trademark and went after the optics, which is where the brand is soft. “The glaring thing for me,” said Sam, who had spent the morning reading about drag queens, “is why the hell are you suing an environmental activist?”. Patagonia has a habit of going corporate and silent the second it’s in a crisis – which can be a very American business approach – as it did when its own climate reporting got picked apart. It’s the purpose brand. It’s being handed a fight against a queer climate activist in the first week of Pride in the US. Why on Earth would it take it on?

Tess had the timeline down pat: suit filed, the public statement from Patagonia landing bang on 1 June, which presents, if you squint, like the worst possible week to be a giant corporation pointing lawyers at a drag queen. She’d also been Googling and reckoned – and we’re filing this as Tess’s mid-debate discovery, not gospel – that the firm acting for Pattie also acts for House Republicans and oil companies, the kind of detail that wins a Reddit thread and loses a friendship.

Andrew swotted the Pride angle away as spin. “That’s her making them look Machiavellian. They’d already filed in January. The June statement just happened to land at the start of Pride Month. She went to sell products and they moved to stop her.”

Eliza had been collecting Pattie’s own words, and they weren’t helping the activist. She’d clocked the line about refusing to “stop giving them free PR” and read it as pure projection. “Her brain is wired for PR and parody, so she knows precisely how much free PR she’s pulling out of this.” The message was argued to be inconsistent: first the defence is I’m a climate activist, then I’m a parody artist, then I’m not even named after the brand, I’m named after the country. You can’t be all things at once. You certainly can’t be a new thing every time the last one stops working.

Neil wasn’t letting the channel slide, because the channel was his strongest card. He pointed out that Pattie Gonia has always lived on TikTok; it’s her native platform, not some war room she sprinted to the moment she was sued. She hosted the brand’s CEO speaking at a conference on TikTok, filmed it, and now allegedly takes his points apart one by one for an audience already in her grandstand. Patagonia, meanwhile, put a statement on Instagram, which is roughly as fun to read as a parking notice. “She knows how to whip up support,” Neil said. “They’ve engaged with none of it.”

This is the exact point where Andrew stopped relitigating and got to the guts of his team’s argument: channel selection exposes the intent behind the whole thing: “You don’t manage a crisis on TikTok. She’s on TikTok because she’s getting the message out fast and getting views. Even if TikTok is her native audience, if you wanted to settle things you wouldn’t keep adding oxygen where the fire is raging. You would speak to more sensible, independent outlets and actually make efforts to put this to bed.”

Then came the bit that made the room go silent (for a second): “Think about how people get to the bottom of something now. They’ve stopped Googling what’s going on with Patagonia versus Pattie Gonia and started asking an LLM for the breakdown. And the LLM goes to earned media – the Time piece, the wire copy – which is exactly where Patagonia has played. Pattie owns the feed, Patagonia owns the record. Instead of solving the problem she’s using it for content as long as she can.” It ultimately depends what either party considers victory: win the lawsuit or win a couple million new views and keep the spotlight rolling?

Which brings us to the question neither team could answer: why did Pattie launch products in the first place? Neil, who was distracted by now, said: “She can be an activist, she can post on TikTok, she can raise awareness of myriad environmental issues. She was doing all of that already. So why the merch?” Nobody on the brand side had a clean answer, because there isn’t one that fits on a placard.

Eliza, who knew the world of drag queens better than any of us (except for maybe Sam as of that morning), laid out how other queens walked the same tightrope without falling off. Trixie Mattel riffs on Mattel and has never once dressed her business in Barbie’s branding: she built Trixie Cosmetics, trademarked them, and Mattel never had a reason to call. JanSport went by “Jan” on RuPaul’s Drag Race to dodge the backpack brand, then collaborated with JanSport for real in 2024. “There was a miss on Pattie’s part,” Eliza said. “She could have extended this into working with Patagonia.”

That handed Andrew his closer and yet another opportunity to not shut up about Nathan Fielder, specifically Dumb Starbucks.

In 2014 Fielder opened a fully functioning coffee shop that cloned a Starbucks with the word “Dumb” bolted on the front, on the theory that US parody law let him use the branding so long as the coffee was technically “art”. It went viral precisely because it was so dumb and so glaring, and it folded almost immediately. The health department got him before the lawyers could. “Even Fielder knew it was a stunt,” said Andrew. “There’s a loophole, and I wonder if she’s seen it and gone, ‘I’ll do the same thing’.” Parody is a real defence, but the courts can also tell the difference between making fun of a brand and becoming one.

And Neil landed the most sensible thing anyone said all day. The fix, he reckoned, is almost embarrassingly simple: “They sit down over a nice cheese sandwich and make Pattie Gonia a Patagonia brand ambassador.” Bring her inside the tent. Stop fighting one of the single most on-brand activists. “There’s got to be a resolution. She’s not going to go away. She’s big on TikTok, she’s getting bigger, and the statement they put out is not going to do anything good. It’s hard to argue Pattie isn’t winning the debate right now.”

He’s right that she’s winning the week. He’s also right that she isn’t going anywhere. But the debate format was built to expose one thing, and it did: both sides are right, and both sides are blowing it.

Patagonia is sitting on one of the deepest goodwill banks in the category but spending it like it will never run dry. This is the brand that gave itself to the Earth, now demanding a climate activist stop activism-adjacent commerce, in a statement so legally cautious it had to bolt on an apology – “We want to acknowledge any hurt it has caused, especially in the LGBTQ+ community” – which is what you write when your own lawyers have walked you somewhere your values would never have gone. The fix was sitting right there: drop the corporate register, bring it back to the climber whose gear broke and the family that gave the company away. We’re not a faceless corporation. We’re protecting a name our founder built, because we give a fuck about all this too. Patagonia has the best founder story in retail and chose to send a trademark lawyer instead. CEO Ryan Gellert says they won’t drop it. Hope the $US1 was worth it.

Pattie, meanwhile, is winning the week and losing the plot. The moment she filed that trademark she stopped being a pun and started being a competing apparel business, and the story keeps shifting because the honest version – I’d like to sell product under a name that rhymes with the most trusted brand in my space – doesn’t fit on a placard either. The cheese sandwich was always on the table. She ordered the lawsuit, because the lawsuit gets millions of views and the sandwich gets none.

We are back at the only tenet that all of us at SKMG really argue at the core of our strategies: is your product good and are you taking the right actions? Patagonia’s product and actions are, on the whole, extraordinary. They forgot to sound like the humans who made them. Pattie’s cause is real, but she framed a commercial decision as a civil rights one and is betting you won’t read to the end.

You probably won’t. That’s the business we’re all in.

Eliza, for the record, spent the back half defending Trixie Mattel’s branding and then confessed, “I am a massive Trixie fan, sorry, maybe I’m biased”. Neil announced he didn’t find Trixie attractive and would not be taking her for a nice fondue meal. Eliza won on points. Tess got back to doing some real work 20 minutes before the debate wrapped. Andrew declared it a draw, which is what the person whose side is losing always declares.

We learned nothing.

What do you reckon? Is Patagonia protecting 50 years of brand equity or punching down on Pride, and would you have sent the lawyer or the founder? Hit reply. The office is still arguing.

What we’re currently obsessed with

Eliza

Vybe. A Sydney local who has been on the scene for 13 years. You can catch Vybe hosting at Universal, Stonewall and elsewhere. Vybe was runner-up in RuPaul’s Drag Race: Down Under, walking away with a few stand-out partnerships with high-profile companies, including Qantas, Disney and PlayStation (without a trademark scandal).

Tess

My favourite drag queen is Hedda Lettuce, who I used to see perform when I lived in New York. Beyond the impeccable lettuce-themed branding (her latest show is called Romaine Calm, which is objectively brilliant), Hedda is one of the funniest performers I’ve ever seen. I used to see her host movie screenings where she’d provide live commentary throughout the film, which was insanely funny and somehow got even funnier the more you drank.

Neil

Actor, singer and one of the first drag queens to break into the mainstream, Divine was unforgettable and more than a little scary. Not in an Insidious jump scare way, but you knew there was no messing with her. Check out the video for her biggest hit and see what I mean. Then watch her in John Waters’ 1972 cult classic Pink Flamingos, in which she played “the filthiest person alive”. It’s shocking and shockingly riveting. She wasn’t a great actor or singer, but boy, did she leave a mark.

Andrew

I know the purists will say this doesn’t count, but fuck it, JOHN TRAVOLTA’S EDNA TURNBLAD.

Sam

Icesis Couture. It’s all in the name, really, given that I’m not well-versed in the whole drag universe (aside from the morning of the debate). But I did my homework and settled on this Canadian superstar. If anyone on Reddit is to be believed, Icesis could have (and should have) won all episodes she competed in on Canada’s Drag Race: Canada vs. the World. She was head and shoulders above everyone else!!

Madeleine Rothery wakes up totally alarm-less, reads fiction in bed before she touches her phone, and then uses an actual wristwatch to keep track of the one non-negotiable in her day: a one-hour window where her tiny Boston Terrier, Disco, is allowed off-leash in a Parisian park.

Madeleine is a freelance fashion writer based in Paris, splitting her time between features, interviews, exhibition catalogues and occasionally lying on her floor thinking about the meaning of fashion and life and everything in between (by her own admission!). Her inbox currently holds north of 12,000 unread emails. Welp. Structure and efficiency are, in her words, apparently missing from her daily vocabulary. Yet somehow, beautiful work keeps coming out of the chaos.

Madeleine lives with endometriosis and is a part-time endometriosis awareness advocate. She’s built a career and a life that can hold both the good days and the harder ones, and she talks about it all with a great openness.

Let’s wander in.

Wake up

I’m a real Luddite and pretty slow to touch my phone in the morning; mornings are stupidly precious to me. I wake up without an alarm, read fiction in bed for a while, then take my tiny dog Disco out to the park. Dog parks are few and far between in Paris and she’s only allowed off leash during a very specific one-hour window each morning, so that’s effectively the only time constraint in our lives (and I use my watch for this!).

Only after that will I sit down with eggs and a coffee, open my dreaded phone, and see what the world wants from me that day.

Morning

I work from home, so the only real divider in my day is when I finally check my emails and Instagram. I haven’t quite mastered the art of inbox management – there are currently over 12,000 unread emails sitting there, oops – but limiting myself to around an hour of replying, client admin and updating my Trello workflow stops me wasting entire days simply responding to people.

Then it’s writing time. I’ll usually close my laptop again and read an article or two from The New Yorker or the London Review of Books to get my head in the game before putting pen to paper. As romantic as this sounds, the reality is more akin to organised chaos: my desk is permanently strewn with papers, dog-eared books, exhibition catalogues and half-filled notebooks.

Afternoon

Gosh, the further I fill this out, the more I realise that structure and efficiency are apparently two words missing from my daily vocabulary. My afternoons largely mirror my mornings, except if I have interviews, client calls or meetings – in which case I’ll usually schedule them for later in the day.

I think the reason my days can seem a bit up in the air is because flexibility has become essential to both my career and living with endometriosis. I never quite know what a day might hold health-wise, so building a softer structure around my work has eliminated a lot of stress for me.

That said, freelance creative work also seems to thrive on a certain amount of wandering and subconscious thinking. Sometimes I’m researching for a feature, sometimes I’m at an exhibition or buried in interview transcripts, and sometimes I’m just lying on my floor thinking about the meaning of fashion and life and everything in between.

I’m also incredibly grateful that the clients and publications I work with are patient and understanding about my situation.

Evening

The day ends when Disco decides it’s time for her evening walk. I’ll usually listen to podcasts while I cook dinner, mainly Tara Brach or Ram Dass Here and Now. Every other night I seem to have some kind of event or dinner for work, but whenever possible I try to be home and in bed by 9.30pm at the latest, usually after a call to my family in Australia on my walk home.

Then it’s phone off and book open, until I fall asleep.

Madeleine’s Picks & Recs

SCREEN TIME: 2 hours, 35 minutes

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO READ: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO: Tara Brach’s Podcast (aforementioned!)

AN UNEXPECTED GOOGLE SEARCH: “Why is my Boston Terrier addicted to chicken sticks?”

A LINK WORTH FORWARDING:

The Good Apocalypse Guide

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8 months ago · 124 likes · 20 comments · Alex Evans

INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT I’M LOVING RIGHT NOW: @ditto.daily - A really great account on women’s health