// INCYMI

June 2026

Screens are so last month. Well, sort of, everyone’s still tuned into SBS. This month the advertising world went big, bold and decidedly in-person. Between the World Cup sending brands into a frenzy and interactive installations popping up everywhere you look, the industry had one clear brief: get people off their screens and into the world. Ideally onto a soccer pitch.

  • Levi's
  • New York City
  • Toronto
  • HBO Max
  • Focus Features
  • A24
  • Gage Roads Brew Co.
  • Coke
  • Une Femme
  • Penguin Random House
  • Dior

FIFA has a very strict clean stadium policy for the world cup, forbidding non-sponsor branding. This causes an issue when your venue is named the Levi’s Stadium. Levi’s found a loophole by covering their name with a giant white sheet in the shape of their brandmark, giving them free publicity during one of the biggest TV events in the world.

As an affordable alternative to official FIFA apparel, New York CityMayor Zohran Mamdani released a NYC-inspired World Cup jersey. Priced at cost and designed by local illustrators. Someone on the internet once said that every story about Mamdani looks like a clip from a Disney movie called Kid Mayor where he just solves every problem.

There’s currently a floating convenience store on Toronto’s waterfront. The public art installation was commissioned to celebrate Toronto’srole as a World Cup host city. Something about connectivity and the universal nature of needing chips at midnight.

While Canada is dealing with their shops floating away, England has dragons on their hands. For House of the Dragon’s third season, HBO Max sent an eight-metre animatronic dragon soaring over London. Call up St George, it’s happening again.

To advertise the horror flick, Obsession, Focus Features created a cool series of increasingly frantic and bizarre billboards. Although it turns out the film did not need any help with exposure as it has now made 300 times (literally) it’s budget and keeps getting extended at the cinema.

A24, the independent studio built on being willing to take a chance on ideas and creatives, has decided to throw all that entirely out the window and nuke their reputation, announcing an “artificial-intelligence research partnership” with Google Deepmind. The studiosays they’re doing it for their artists, while the director of their biggest hit to date called it “genuinely harmful”.

Competing for the most Australian sentence ever written, Gage Roads Brew Co. has created a surfboard full of beer. The board is filled with 10 litres of Gage Roads Summer Ale ‘Single Fin’, and is both drinkable and surfable.

Never one to leave a market untapped, Coke has designed chopsticks in the shape of its classic contour bottle. ‘Cokesticks’ (no comment) were designed to address the issue that soft-drinks go well with a lot of western food, but not a lot of Asian cuisine. If you can’t get your product to pair, at least get your logo.

What’s better than getting wine drunk and arguing at a book club? Lots of things, but it’s pretty great. Une Femme, a maker of canned and bottled wines, launched a book club with Penguin Random House, pairing a wine with a book written by a woman.

The very hungry caterpillar is now hungry for couture (we’ll workshop that joke), as Dior has turned Eric Carle’s children’s classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar into luxury capsule collection. We can’t even be sardonic here, it looks cool as hell.

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