Most Upfronts sell you a vision and hope you don’t ask for the numbers. On Wednesday night in Sydney, Amazon did the opposite. They put three brands on stage and made them show the receipts.

That’s the part that made me put my drink down. Because underneath the sizzle reels and the jazz hands, this Upfront was quietly settling the argument every marketer I know has been having for a decade. Brand on one side, performance on the other. Two teams, two budgets, two dashboards that never quite met in the middle. We built the whole industry around that gap and spent our careers trying to reach across it.

On Tuesday, the wall came down. Not “is coming down,” not in a five-years-out, vision-statement way. Three brands, three sets of real numbers, one structural shift underneath all of them.

I had a good seat for it. I was backstage with a mic, interviewing Willie Pang and L’Oréal Groups’s Georgia Hack, and it was a proper night. Luke Hemsworth talking The Terminal List, Teresa Palmer on the submarine thriller she just wrapped on the Gold Coast, Sophie Molineux fresh off captaining the Aussie women to an undefeated T20 World Cup. The slate they teased is stacked too: Fourth Wing, the Rebecca Yarros romantasy the internet has lost its mind over, and Tomb Raider with Sophie Turner as Lara Croft, from Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Great theatre. But the theatre wasn’t the story. The receipts were.

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01 — The open internet, in one place

The headline most people will miss because it landed in the last ten minutes: you can now buy Netflix and Spotify through the Amazon DSP.

Sit with that. The trillions of Amazon shopping, streaming and browsing signals now apply across Netflix. Spotify’s Ad Exchange plugs straight in, so you plan audio next to your video and display. Add Disney, HBO Max, Paramount, the Aussie broadcasters, the local audio networks (SCA, ARN, Nova), and a pilot to run ads through ChatGPT via a new OpenAI partnership, and the picture gets clear fast.

→ So what: the thing that made cross-channel advertising a nightmare was never the channels. It was the seams between them. Different targeting, different measurement, different logins. Amazon isn’t adding another screen to your plan. It’s removing the seams. Planned, bought and measured from one place, wherever the audience actually is.

I actually got Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Ads in the same room for a podcast on the back of this. The visual alone tells the story: three ad platforms that used to compete, on one couch, talking about how they now work together. Episode’s linked at the bottom.

02 — L’Oréal proved you don’t have to choose

The L’Oréal Paris x Elle results were revealed on stage for the first time, and Georgia Hack, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer of L’Oréal Group, framed it better than any marketer I’ve heard this year: the math and the magic.

The magic was a 90s beauty integration inside the Legally Blonde prequel. Scrunchies, chihuahuas, nostalgia, an actual product integration built from products that existed in 1995. The math: over a million viewers on Prime Video, a 95% completion rate, 5,000-plus branded searches, 1,600 purchases, and a 25% lift in unaided brand recall.

→ So what: reach or outcomes has always been a false choice we made because the tools forced us to. When the same system that builds the cultural moment also closes the loop on the transaction, you stop trading one for the other. Georgia’s line, “you can actually have both,” isn’t a slogan. It’s a receipt.

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03 — You don’t even need to sell on Amazon

The one I keep thinking about is CommBank. An Australian first: Amazon Ads built a bespoke propensity model on AWS and Amazon’s first-party signals to work out who was actually in-market for a credit card, refreshed every 24 hours, served the right card creative in real time.

A bank. Not a product you buy on Amazon. The results were the strongest brand lift Pat Crowley’s team had seen in years, a 2x lift in credit card consideration, and a 15% jump in customers adding a CommBank card to their Amazon wallet.

→ So what: this is the part that reframes everything. If a bank can win here, the “but we don’t sell on Amazon” objection is dead. The signals aren’t about what you sell in the store. They’re about understanding people, and every category gets to use them.

A quick aside, because I promised myself one

The agentic AI stuff is real too, and I don’t say that lightly about anything with “agent” in the name. Willie demoed the Amazon Ads agent doing campaign management by voice. “Lift the bids on campaigns pacing below 75%,” and it does it, no SQL, no manual grind. The MCP server went open beta globally, so whatever you’re building in Claude or ChatGPT plugs straight in.

For everyone who spends their life squeezing two percent out of a campaign, that’s your afternoons back. I’ll believe the fully autonomous version when I see it. But this bit, I saw.

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The read

Three brands. Three sets of real numbers. One structural shift underneath all of them. That’s not a coincidence of scheduling, it’s the whole argument.

The wall between brand and performance was never really about strategy. It was about tools that couldn’t talk to each other, so we split the work to match. Once they can talk, the split stops making sense. It’s just a customer, and a system that follows them from the thing they watched to the thing they bought.

So here’s my question for the room. If that wall is actually coming down, the one we’ve organised our teams, our budgets and our entire careers around, what are we still building separately out of habit?

The full podcast with Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Ads is linked here. Go watch three industry heavy hitters share a couch.

Brooke x

MOODY is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted. The room where founders, operators, corporates and creatives are in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other. These are the girls who get it and we are in a MOOD.

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

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Last week I sat in a room with Australia’s biggest podcasters and watched two platform execs describe an internet that has stopped paying for being liked.

Jordyn Christensen and Kirsty Wilson put the room together. Jordyn runs podcast partnerships at Spotify, Kirsty is Global Partnerships at Meta ANZ. Toni Lodge and Ryan Jon keynoted, and if you don’t know them: five episodes a week on their show Toni & Ryan, over a million downloads a month, built out of rude jokes that went viral on TikTok.

I debriefed with Jordyn afterwards and we did not stop talking for an hour. This is that conversation, with receipts.

It starts where everything started that week. Tate McRae picked up a makeup wipe and the whole creator economy fell out of it.

You’ve seen the video. Private jet to Lollapalooza, post show routine, more than eighteen million views, and the wipe never touched her face. Not once. It hovered.

The internet went feral, obviously. But nobody’s talking about what happened eleven days later. Neutrogena posted a reply voiced by an animated makeup wipe, asking everyone to please respect its privacy as it adjusts to fame. Iconic, no notes. A marketing academic told the New York Times the episode probably grew awareness, on the basis that nobody was otherwise going to be discussing makeup wipes in the Times.

So read the ledger. She paid in credibility. They collected in reach. Then they got a bonus round for the trouble.

This isn’t a Tate McRae problem. She was just the one holding the wipe when the model stopped working for creators.

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A rate card is not a business

The generalist influencer was never a business. It was a rental agreement.

You rent reach from a platform monthly. You sell it on to a brand at a discount. The second either party changes the terms, you own nothing. No authority, no niche, no list, no feed. A rate card and a good week.

Jordyn’s version:

I’d already felt it land in my inbox. A brand sent me a brief last month and the first page was a list of things they didn’t want. No day in my life. No morning routine. Nothing beauty led. What they wanted was the teardown, the how does this actually work version. They were paying for the part of me that knows things and had specifically ruled out the part of me that turns up looking fine.

Five years ago that brief was the exact opposite document. Same category, same money, reverse polarity.

Now the less flattering half, because I’m not standing outside this. Most deals I sign carry an exclusivity clause. Standard, priced accordingly, everybody does it. It is also, said out loud, a brand paying me not to be an expert on anything else in that category for a set number of months.

I sign them. I’d sign the next one. But I’ve stopped reading exclusivity as a premium and started reading it as a price, because every category I sell out of is a category I’ve agreed not to be trusted in.

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Brands didn’t grow a conscience

They moved the budget.

Influencer spend used to sit in the brand bucket, where the job was awareness and nobody had to prove very much. It’s been quietly reclassified as performance, and performance budgets have always been measured to death. Every line gets judged on cost per acquisition and average order value like any other media buy.

So the attribution was always there. Nobody was pointing it at us.

Being liked was free money right up until somebody started counting. Likeability stopped being a line item. You cannot attribute a vibe. You can attribute an expert who moves a category.

Rachel Lai made the same case this week from the buying side, and better than I just did. She’d just onboarded a client and committed tens of thousands to partnerships, and none of the top affiliates driving those sales are making get ready with me content. What those creators charge reflects their authority, their expertise, and the trust their audience places in them.

Cat Spanti is the clearest version of this. You go to her because she’s a known authority on one thing, not because she surfaced in your feed on a Tuesday. She also moves product, and her ShopMy is the proof. Measurable, which is the entire point.

The platforms are building for the same shift. Instagram is testing Series, which groups your reels into a titled hub with a watch next button. Its VP of Product Tessa Lyons said the quiet part out loud at the Scaleable Summit: the platform wants to be part of creators’ long form strategy now, not just the short form one.

Meta spent five years training all of us to make things fifteen seconds long. It has now built a channel guide.

Taste is a mood. Expertise is a position you can be held to.

Toni put it in one line: “When you try to be relevant to everyone, you’re relevant to no one.”

Authority needs room

The same market that started paying for expertise also started rewarding length. Not a coincidence.

A reel can make a claim. Only long form shows the thinking underneath it, and the thinking is what’s being bought. Which means the expert shift and the long form shift are one shift, and we’ve spent three years reading the top of the funnel like it’s the bottom of it.

TikTok is where that error lives, and it’s still the best discovery machine ever built. It let in a whole generation of creators who’d never have been allowed in the room otherwise. Toni and Ryan are the proof, and Toni is unsentimental about it: “The short form videos for us is literally what began this whole thing, and we wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t taken a chance on posting it.”

But discovery is a job, not a destination. Jordyn:

Her read on why the audience moved is the part I keep repeating, because it isn’t about attention spans at all. Gen Z want things that feel a bit media. Educational, inspirational, made with intent. Not five seconds of something.

A million views on something nobody can find again isn’t a business. It’s a party trick.

Kirsty put the same point from inside the building, about the grid everybody agonises over. Nobody comes to your grid as much as you do. Vanity metric, her words.

Then the local number nobody is using. Edison’s Infinite Dial Australia 2026 has fifty five per cent of Australians consuming podcasts monthly, up from fifty two per cent last year. Buried in the same report: TikTok weekly usage, down a percentage point year on year.

Same market. Same twelve months. One up, one down.

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Own the thing nobody can switch off

Long form has a second advantage: it’s the only format that lives somewhere you control. Nobody has an RSS feed of your reels.

Here’s the test I run on everything now. If the algorithm changed its mind tomorrow, would this still exist?

MOODY passes. Five hundred plus women in a WhatsApp community and a calendar of events, with no feed sitting between me and them. Nobody can throttle it. Nobody can deprecate it. We’re growing it across channels but the list is the asset.

Long form expert content and education is the natural next expansion and I’ll be honest, we’re still working out what that looks like for the community. But the direction isn’t in question. Jordyn:

The numbers back it.

Platforms only cut the entry bar when they need supply. Read that as a hiring ad, not a favour.

The money has moved to retention, not reach. Kirsty walked us through two pieces of content from the same podcast, and the longer one that actually held people paid out double.

None of this is new, which is the funny part. Subscriptions and AdSense are the OG revenue streams. We’re not inventing the future. We’re going back to charging people for something good, after a decade of asking advertisers to cover it.

The advertiser model makes the creator the product. The subscription model makes the work the product.

Only one of those survives a bad week.

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Everyone wants a village

Toni and Ryan solved the ownership problem years ago, while everyone else was still arguing about it. They refuse to send anyone anywhere.

Their private Facebook group of a hundred and fifty thousand has never carried a sponsored post. Deliberately. They answer their own comments and their own DMs.

Which sounds like the opposite of owning an audience, right up until you notice where their money is.

It’s Patreon. It converts precisely because the free tiers were never a funnel.

Ryan’s reasoning is the least complicated thing in this article: “If you want someone to comment on your stuff, the least you can do is read it.” Then the line I’m never going to beat: everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager.

If you’re on the brand side

Two things follow from all of this, and neither of them is a content calendar.

The first is who you brief. Stop buying reach and start buying authority in your actual category. A creator with a defined niche and a measurable audience will move product in a way a general lifestyle name will not, and you’ll be able to prove it, which is the part your CFO cares about.

The second is what you make. If audiences have moved to long form, your brand needs a long form answer, and most don’t have one. A podcast, a series, an owned newsletter, something with room in it. Right now nearly everyone is still buying fifteen second placements inside somebody else’s feed and calling it a strategy.

The read

Tate McRae spent her audience relationship on a wipe she never used and the brand kept the change. Toni and Ryan spend nothing and charge for the trust directly. Same asset, opposite directions.

Which brings me back to that brief. A brand paid a premium for the version of me that knows something, and specifically didn’t want the version that shows up looking fine. That’s not a category quirk. That’s the market repricing, and the creators who’ve spent five years being pleasant about everything are about to find out what pleasant is worth.

Twelve things we learnt in that room

Before the tactics, the four that actually matter. Name the one thing you want to be called about, and make it one. Move your best thinking somewhere it can breathe. Build one line of contact with no algorithm sitting in the middle of it. Price exclusivity as what it costs you, not what they’re offering.

Now the toolkit.

→ 2/3 of your reels go to strangers. reels are for reach, carousels and stories are where you actually keep people

→ only slides 1 and 2 of a carousel get served, so stop saving the good stuff for slide six

→ you can reorder a carousel after posting. your best slide is data now, not a guess

→ add audio to a carousel and it gets served in the reels tab. same post, new audience

→ “new ep out now” was the worst performing content across the top 100 pods. announcing is not marketing

→ one personal moment outperforms a hundred polished clips. the polish was never the point

→ jump on every new feature the week it launches. meta gives its own products extra visibility and early movers get the growth

→ shares are the metric for entertainment, saves are the metric for education. know which one you’re making

→ write the clip before you record. if you’re cutting after the fact you’re already too late

→ threads is 500m people and australia is asleep. that’s not a risk, that’s a gap

→ facebook pays from 10 seconds. everything shorter is unpaid labour

→ don’t be the girl begging meta for help when you get hacked. turn on 2fa!!!

Brooke x

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MOODY is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted. The room where founders, operators, corporates and creatives are in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other. These are the girls who get it, and we are in a MOOD.

This newsletter is the highlight reel. The WhatsApp is where we actually live.

Every city, growing weekly.

🔗 Join MOODY →

🔗 Follow MOODY on social→

It’s been a month since Singapore, which is exactly the right amount of time. The recaps are out, the LinkedIn glow has faded, and what’s left is the stuff that actually stuck. That’s the version you’re getting.

Quick scene-setting for the girls who don’t live in retail: NRF is the National Retail Federation’s Big Show, the largest retail conference in the world, held in New York every January. NRF APAC is its Asia-Pacific edition, held in Singapore in early June, and it’s the biggest retail gathering in our region.

Now sit with two numbers.

New York in January: 40,000 people. Singapore in June: 11,000.

Easy to read that as the little sibling event. The satellite show. The warm-up act. It’s the exact wrong read, and the opening address said why: by 2035, Asia-Pacific overtakes North America as the world’s largest consumption region, with affluent households growing at six times the pace of the rest of the world. The region already gave the world the super-app, social commerce and Singles’ Day while the West was still A/B testing button colours.

The small room is the main event. The big room just doesn’t know it yet.

Quick bias declaration before we go on: I work at AWS, we co-hosted the Aussie delegation and the Retail Safari, and this is literally my day job. Take everything below with that context. The opinions, though, are all mine, and a few of them are not in the corporate pack.

01 — Australia finally got on the bus

The delegation was the bit that made me proudest. Woolies, Myer, David Jones, ALDI, Wesfarmers, THE ICONIC, The Warehouse, Aspar. Australia and New Zealand’s best and brightest retailers, on a bus in Singapore, instead of in a cab downtown New York.

That matters more than it sounds. Australian retail has a default setting: when we want inspiration, we look west. US formats, US playbooks, US conferences. But the growth isn’t west. The consumption boom is north of us, the AI adoption curve is steepest north of us, and the retail formats that will eat our lunch if we ignore them are being built two time zones away, in our region, in our trading hours.

→ So what: if you’re a founder or marketer choosing where to spend your one conference budget or your one research trip this year, the maths has changed. Seoul, Singapore, Bangkok and Shanghai are the field trip now. New York is the rerun.

I’m taking my own advice: I’m doing China in September and I can NOT wait.

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02 — Here’s my note

The content was strong, I want that on the record. The LVMH session with Anish Melwani was the most quoted of the week for a reason: his line that if every customer service agent ends up virtual, “the last customer service agent will work for LVMH.” As AI takes the admin, human interaction becomes the scarce, premium thing. Ten years of “human is the new luxury” talk and he made it a business model in one sentence.

His other idea is the one I want every founder in this community to sit with: the difference between demand and desire. Demand is what customers tell you they want. Desire is the emotion you create in them. “A great brand will come up with products that nobody ever asked for, that yesterday nobody had ever seen before, but today some portion of the audience can’t live without. That’s desire. That’s not demand.” You cannot survey your way to it. You read the moment, back your taste, and make the thing nobody requested. Every founder agonising over another round of customer feedback before shipping needed to hear that.

But I’ve been sitting on this one for a month and it hasn’t softened: I want Asia’s conference to be Asian.

We flew in Europe’s finest, LVMH and Kering, to a room in Singapore, and a good chunk of the agenda was a recap of what already played in New York in January. Meanwhile the most interesting retail on the planet right now is happening in China, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam. Olive Young, the Korean beauty retailer that every Western beauty exec is quietly obsessed with, got a small session that didn’t hit. That’s the brand I wanted an hour with. That’s the brand I flew for.

The best read of the whole week backed me up. Dr Frank Yang’s closing keynote on China was the sharpest thing on any stage: Chinese youth consumption shifting from planned to instant, shoppers trading up from price-performance to price-quality, and the whole market moving from buying goods to buying lifestyle, with emotional, self-pleasing consumption now driving growth. One keynote. I wanted a full day of that, from every hot market in the region.

The gap between what that conference was and what it could be is the same gap I wrote about after Vogue Codes. So close to extraordinary. Give me less of Europe explaining luxury to Asia and more of Asia explaining the future to everyone else.

03 — FOBO, the acronym that followed everyone home

FOMO is dead. The new condition is FOBO: the fear of better options.

KPMG’s Global Head of Consumer and Retail, Isabelle Allen, put it on the table on day one: “The new term is FOBO, the fear of better options. The risk is not just that you invest and get some things wrong. The greater risk is that you wait and fall behind, or get excluded from the party altogether.”

Nobody’s scared of missing AI anymore. They’re scared that whatever they commit to now gets outdone by something cheaper and better next month, so they wait. The tool paralysis is real: every week there’s a new model, a new agent, a new platform someone swears is the one, and freezing starts to feel like the responsible move.

By the end of the week the acronym had quietly upgraded itself into something darker: the fear of being obsolete. And I’m going to plant my flag here, because I think the second definition is the correct one. “Better options” makes waiting sound rational, like you’re a savvy shopper holding out for the sale. You’re not. There is no perfect moment coming, and the option you pick matters far less than the muscle you build using it. The experimenting you do right now, the messy pilots, the wrong first tool, the prompt that didn’t work, is the actual capability. It compounds. Sit out this window because you’re waiting for a better option and you don’t fall behind by one tool, you fall behind by every lesson the tool would have taught you. That’s not behind. That’s obsolete.

The best answer to FOBO on any stage came from FairPrice, Singapore’s biggest grocer. Their “store of tomorrow” runs about nine AI initiatives at once, and they only keep the ones that earn their place against real business metrics. Basket size. Gross margin. Not vibes.

→ So what: this applies whether you’re running a startup or a team inside a corporate. You don’t need the perfect tool. You need small, no-regret bets measured against one real number, and the discipline to kill the ones that don’t move it. The cost of a wrong bet is a lesson. The cost of no bet is your relevance.

04 — Your product data is your shopfront now

This is the section to forward to anyone with a Shopify store, a marketplace listing or a marketing budget.

I told you in the June cap table report that agentic checkout went live in Australia, with THE ICONIC, Adore Beauty and Bunnings feeding product data straight into Google. Singapore was three days of the why. Retail is handing the act of discovery over to AI. Increasingly, a shopper doesn’t search for your product; her AI agent does. And agents don’t browse. They don’t feel a vibe. They don’t look at pictures.

They read data.

Here’s the number that should scare you into action: a Mirakl study of retail websites across the region found an average product-data readiness score of 48 out of 100, with fewer than one in a hundred sites scoring above 80. Myer’s Warwick Blunt was refreshingly honest about it on stage: a dress carried only in evocative marketing copy may never be surfaced for the shopper who wants it, because the agent can’t read “effortless summer elegance.” It can read fabric, fit, occasion, size, stock and shipping speed.

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Roger Dunn’s session gave the week its best line: when discovery, comparison and purchase collapse into a single AI interaction, the brand becomes metadata. His numbers were just as sharp:

→ A Google search averages 3.4 words. A prompt to ChatGPT can run to sixty. Keywords are ice cubes, uniform and mass-produced; prompts are snowflakes, layered with context. The signal is ten times richer, if your data can answer it.

→ Traffic arriving from AI assistants converts at around 11.4%, miles above paid or direct, because that shopper has already done her research.

→ Shoppers trust a retailer’s own AI tools roughly three times more than the big platforms’, and Walmart sees order values rise about a third when customers shop through its agent, Sparky. The retailer’s edge is knowing what’s actually in stock, right now, at what price. The big models don’t.

→ So what: enriching your product data is the least glamorous and highest-leverage marketing job of 2026. Structured attributes, reviews, sizing, stock, shipping. If the AI can’t read you, you don’t exist at the exact moment someone’s ready to buy. For a small brand this is the rare game where you can out-execute a department store with a spreadsheet and a weekend.

05 — The marketing money, and where it’s going

Three sessions, one uncomfortable message for anyone holding a marketing budget.

→ Les Binet, the effectiveness godfather, came with receipts: how much you invest accounts for roughly 90% of the profit marketing generates, and the efficiency of each dollar only about 10%. Since the pandemic, marketers have nudged measured ROI up a few points while actual profitability fell by more. Leaner, and delivering less. His fix: weight spend roughly 60/40 towards brand over short-term activation, and protect share of voice even when the budget conversation gets ugly. And the line to pin above your desk: big brands that imitate small brands become small brands.

→ Adrian Staiti of CAA called time on celebrity badging. Slapping a famous face on a product and calling it a campaign is dead money. Asking what a celebrity costs is, in his words, like asking how long is a piece of rope. The winners start with the story, then find the partner. One Snapdragon x Manchester United announcement did more for awareness than years of paid media.

→ Crafted’s Sarah Nesheim brought the creator maths. Don’t chase virality, manufacture word-of-mouth: activate creators by the hundreds on standardised rates, watch what resonates, then whitelist the winners and run paid under the creator’s own handle so the social proof stays intact. Lo-fi UGC at $0 to $200 a video routinely beats polished brand creative. And measure incrementality, the customers who wouldn’t otherwise have bought, not ROAS.

→ So what: the founder playbook writes itself. A few micro-creators in real relationships beat one expensive celebrity post, brand-building is an investment not a luxury, and the moment your audience feels tricked by fake or AI-made content, the trust is gone for good.

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06 — The safari (hot af, worth it)

Day three we swapped the keynote stage for the streets. The Retail Safari with NORA was thirty-plus degrees, a hundred percent humidity, and we were so, so sweaty. I’d do it again tomorrow. Nothing beats seeing retail in the wild.

The stop worth your attention is New Bahru: the beautifully preserved former Nan Chiau High School reborn as a retail precinct, with more than forty independent, made-in-Singapore, mostly founder-led brands and not a single mass chain. Badminton court markings still on the floor. Every tenant chosen for fit, not for the footfall guarantee. It’s what happens when curation is the actual strategy, and it made every Australian on that bus quietly rethink what a “centre” is for.

FairPrice Finest was the other one: a supermarket with a bar in it, craft beer on tap and meals cooked from ingredients in the aisle you’re standing in. Grocery as a destination, not a chore.

And the thing I personally can’t stop thinking about: single-brand beauty stores in their full expression. Walking into one brand’s complete world is magic, and the discipline is asking what travels. The Prada Beauty spring flower market was the masterclass: the concept worked at full scale in-store and compressed down to a single gondola at the airport. That’s the test of a real retail idea. It survives shrinking.

Honest caveat for the Australian reader: plenty of this won’t copy-paste here. Singapore is six million people in 730 square kilometres; we are sprawl. The density economics that make a New Bahru or a four-visits-a-week grocery habit work are not our economics. Steal the principle, not the format. Curation, participation, hospitality woven into retail. The inspo travels even when the floor plan doesn’t.

07 — A brief intermission about a tiny mic

Sophie and I spent the breaks running around with the tiny mic, trapping executives as they came off stage for LinkedIn content, and it was unhinged behaviour that I refuse to apologise for.

Here’s the surreal bit. Twelve months of doing this across conferences and the tiny mic now gets recognised. Executives I would have died to get five minutes with were coming up to ME saying they like the content and asking to be featured. Build the thing consistently and the room starts coming to you.

And then someone gave me feedback that stung because it was true: “You’re a brilliant journalist in the making. However, you parrot what other people say. Be more opinionated.”

Girl. Noted.

This is the magic of building a personal brand, and why I’ll keep telling every one of you to start. Jobs change, companies restructure, titles get taken off you. The brand is the only thing you take with you. And apparently mine now comes with feedback, which means it’s working.

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Where this leaves us

Every stat from the week points the same direction. The consumption growth is in Asia. The AI adoption curve is steepest in Asia. The retail formats worth studying are being built in Asia. And the biggest retail conference in our region just put Australia’s entire retail leadership on a bus to go look at it, then filled half the stage time with Europe and New York.

Both things can be true. The event was excellent. The event is also one brave agenda away from being the most important retail gathering in the world.

My read: Asia was never coming. It’s been here the whole time, and the only thing that was ever west was our attention.

So: when did you last pay attention to what’s happening in APAC for inspiration instead of America? Reply, I want to know.

Brooke x

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Aussie Angels is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted. The room where founders, operators, corporates and creatives are in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other. These are the girls who get it.

Any excuse to be in a room full of ambitious Australian women is my actual joy in life. It’s the whole reason Aussie Angels exists. So Saturday at Vogue Codes was always going to be a good day for me. The room was beautiful, the speakers were genuinely brilliant, the energy was unmatched, and I left with a gift bag I needed a forklift to carry. Eleven years in, the fact that this event exists at all, that Vogue has spent a decade insisting women belong at the centre of the tech conversation, is a real achievement and I don’t take it for granted.

And. (You knew there was an and.)

I left a little frustrated. Not because the day was bad, but because it was so close to being extraordinary, and I think the women in that room could have handled, and deserved, more. So in the spirit of loving something enough to give it real feedback rather than a polite clap, here are my notes. Vogue, if you’re reading, I am sticking my hand up to help curate next year. More on that later.

Note one: twenty minutes is not a panel, it’s a trailer

Here was the format for most of the day. Three extraordinary speakers, one moderator, two questions each, twenty minutes total. Run the numbers. By the time everyone’s been introduced with the multi-hyphenate biographies they’ve absolutely earned, you have maybe ten real minutes of conversation, split three ways.

That’s not enough time to get anywhere good. You get the headline and the applause line, and then the moderator has to wrap because the clock’s already gone. You never reach the specificity, the how, the part where someone actually teaches you something you can use on Monday.

And when the timing slips, it slips unevenly. In the Big Tech panel, Laura Henshaw, who was excellent, spoke for a good chunk of the slot before the other two panelists had properly been brought in. I’m not mad at Laura. She was great. I’m mad at the container. Three women that good should never be fighting each other for oxygen inside a slot that short.

The fix is not complicated. Fewer panels, longer. Two questions becomes five. Give a brilliant woman thirty-five minutes and she’ll change how you think. Give her twenty and she’ll give you a soundbite. We came for more than soundbites.

Note two: “humanity first” is lovely, but it let us off the hook

The whole day ran on a humanity-first thesis. Slow down. Touch grass. Make things with your hands. Your taste is your own. Protect your nervous system from the algorithm. And look, I agree with almost all of it. The ancestral knowledge panel was my favourite of the day and I’ll defend the cortisol stats from the Unyoked CMO to anyone. (Twenty minutes in nature drops your cortisol by twenty percent. Two nights off grid beats yoga, meditation and CBT by fifty percent. Genuinely useful.)

But here’s my problem. A room full of ambitious women, many of them in tech, retail, media and STEM, gathered at a tech summit, and we spent most of the day being gently reassured that the human stuff still matters. Of course it matters. Nobody in that room needed convincing that they’re a person.

And before anyone reads this as anti-humanity: it isn’t. The human stuff is literally my whole thing. I build community for ambitious women for a living; connection is the soul of everything I do. But that’s exactly why I want more for them. When you get a room of women this capable together this rarely, you owe them more than reassurance.

What we didn’t get was the part where we face into the tech and actually skill up. We talked about AI mostly as a thing to be wary of. Bias in, bias out, true and important. But we barely touched what’s actually coming, or how a woman in that room could use it, build with it, or position her career and her business around it.

We barely touched the word “agentic” all day. Not the AI agents that are about to do real work on our behalf, not what they mean for our jobs, not agentic commerce reshaping how every brand reaches a customer. The single biggest shift in how technology will move through our lives, and at a summit about the future, hosted by Vogue, in 2026, it was essentially absent.

Meanwhile, the week before, in New York, (the self-described Anna Wintour of fashion tech, and honestly the title fits) ran the FASHIONOLOGY Summit with All Things Fashion Tech. Fourteen hundred people. Nine panels. The lineup, just so you feel it: trend forecasting and data, agentic commerce, virtual try-on, the creator economy, wearables, material innovation, and fashion tech investment. A scent salon and a wearables showcase as activations. That is what facing into the tech looks like. That is a room walking out with new language, new contacts, and a map of where the industry is actually going. I almost flew to NYC for it and I regret not.

And the news she’s covering right now is the exact conversation we should have been having. Sephora is partnering with Google so you can research, build a basket and check out inside an LLM, because that’s where discovery is moving. OTB, the group behind Diesel and Margiela, is doing AI try-on with Google Cloud. ZyG just raised sixty million to scale an agentic ecommerce operating system. This is happening now, to fashion and retail specifically, and it is going to reshape how every brand in that Vogue room reaches a customer.

Here’s the part that really got me, and I’ll declare my interest because I work at AWS, so this is my actual day job. Three weeks before Vogue Codes, AWS launched the Agentic Shopping Assistant, which lets a retailer stand up its own branded AI shopping agent in about sixty days instead of building it from scratch over years. The flagship example? The Kate Spade AI Gift Concierge, built by Tapestry, which guides a shopper to the right gift in conversation. That is fashion x tech. That is a handbag brand running a production AI agent, live, right now. Accenture reckons more than thirty percent of online commerce could run through AI agents by 2030, somewhere around 3.1 trillion dollars in transactions. So we had, in one Sydney room, a few hundred of the exact women who are going to have to navigate that shift in their careers and their businesses, and we spent the day talking about whether the algorithm is bad for our nervous systems. Both things can be true. But only one of them sends you home able to do something on Monday.

Vogue x fashion tech should be the easiest, most obvious, most powerful version of this event. The audience is right there. The cultural authority is right there. We could own this conversation in this region the way nobody else can. We just have to be brave enough to go deeper than “slow down and touch grass.”

And the moment that summed up the whole miss: Arms Rosenberg, who has built a global fund run by AI agents trained on her own brain, sat on stage and let investing get waved off as “boring,” just spreadsheets and data. I sat there a little stunned. Investing is not boring. Investing is the single most direct mechanism women have to build actual power, the thing every other panel that day was quietly begging for. We talked about closing the women’s health gap, paying female athletes properly, getting women into the rooms where systems get built. All of it runs on capital. All of it runs on women owning assets and compounding them.

Calling that “boring” in a room full of ambitious women is the problem in miniature: we reached for the relatable, self-deprecating framing when we could have taught the room how to actually do the thing. Arms could have spent twenty minutes on how she thinks about conviction and risk and price targets, and we’d have walked out richer, literally. Instead we got “it’s just data.” That depth was right there, and we left it on the table.

Note three (a brief intermission for the funniest moment of the day)

The Qantas panel, on the psychology of the twenty-plus-hour Project Sunrise flights, was genuinely interesting. Human-centred design, lighting that mirrors your destination so a sunrise rolls from the front of the plane to the back, ten years of research with the Charles Perkins Centre. Cool stuff.

But I will be thinking until I die about the bit where they proudly unveiled, as a design innovation, a “wellbeing zone” so that economy passengers can stand up and move around. The only airline in the world to specifically design a space where the people in economy are allowed to have a body. Girl. That’s an aisle. We’ve reinvented the aisle and put it in a deck. I laughed. I’m still laughing. Iconic, no notes.

What we did cover, and what was actually great

I don’t want the notes to drown out the wins, because there were real ones. The highlights, in scannable form:

On the medical panel (the best content of the day): Professor Kate Drummond’s case for fixing a male-default profession without dropping a single standard is the cleanest I’ve heard. Define the real minimum bar, then actively favour the women who clear it until the culture changes. She’s doing it in neurosurgery right now, because the alternative is waiting two hundred years for equity. Two hundred.

On the women’s health gap: Lydia O’Donnell’s stat that only six percent of sports science research is done exclusively on women explains roughly everything about why we’ve all been training on a men’s plan with the hormones deleted. And the line every founder should pin to the wall: every dollar put into closing the women’s health gap returns three. It’s not charity, it’s the most underpriced market going.

On AI and bias (Dr Amandeep Hansra): train AI on history and you don’t fix bias, you automate it at scale. A heart attack presents differently in women, but the models learned the male version. Sixty percent of women’s-health answers from the top AI tools came back wrong. The only fix is women in the room building the thing, which is exactly the argument for a day like this existing. I just wish we’d spent more time on how to actually get into those rooms.

On the astronaut (Catherine Bennell-Pegg): until 1966 women in the Australian public service had to resign when they married. Banks wouldn’t give a woman a loan without a male guarantor until the seventies. But we put men on the moon in 1969. We could leave the planet before a woman could open a bank account on her own. Her reframe of the old line is the thing I wrote down twice: we say you can’t be what you can’t see, and she added, you can’t be what you can’t see yourself being. Fewer than four percent of engineers in Australia are Australian-born women. We are, in her words, leaving too much talent on the launch pad.

On ancestral knowledge: Maeva Heim of Bread Beauty said the thing I’m still turning over: the value of making things with your hands, the one skill AI can’t touch, and how that human craft gets more valuable as the world automates, not less. It flips the AI-doom framing on its head, the most human things you can do become your edge. A genuinely great idea, and I’ll be honest, also a comfortable one for a tech summit to land on. I wanted the panel pushed one step further: okay, so how does a founder actually price and protect that human value when the machines are this good?

That’s the follow-up we ran out of time for. And Liandra Gaykamangu of LIANDRA gently dismantled the whole morning by noting we’d spent hours talking about going to space to save the Earth, when Earth is already great, and maybe the constant push to be the best, the most, the fastest is the actual problem. Indigenous knowledge has held “by less, but better” for tens of thousands of years. Fashion’s discovering it this season and calling it new.

On money: Lucy Kough of Tap the Gap said start now, because time is the only ingredient you can’t buy back. Super compounds like a snowball, and a third of Australians have never once checked one of the biggest investments they’ll ever own.

On work: work is a mindset now, not a place, with three in four people already working across multiple locations. And the people hiring aren’t buying technical skills, they’re buying mindset: curious, adaptable, willing to back yourself. The TechnologyOne leader who said it traced her own adaptability to a childhood spent constantly moving, always the new girl. The thing you think is your messy backstory is often the exact thing that makes you hireable.

On founders: the angel investor’s filter for whether to back someone, are you real or performative, grounded in three things. Execution: do you have a product and talk to customers, or just a beautiful story? Feedback: when she gives you a note, do you act on it? Iteration: are you making the thing better than yesterday? She’ll watch a founder for months before writing a cheque. It’s a sharp filter to turn on yourself, too.

On AI, the reframe that stuck: Arms again, with the most useful answer to AI anxiety I heard all day. Her agents aren’t replacing her, they are her, accelerated: four decades of investing experience built into the system with her judgment at the core. The AI doesn’t sideline her expertise, it scales it. Which is the thing the whole day kept circling. Train AI on the male default and you automate the male default. Build it with women in control and it’s just leverage. So the better question isn’t “will AI take my job,” it’s “how do I make it an extension of my own brain before someone else’s becomes the default.”

That, right there, is the conversation I wanted the whole day to be. Who’s holding the pen, and how do you, woman in row 14, get your hands on it.

So here’s my pitch

I went to 3 large enterprise tech events last month and walked out thinking about a different gap. The rooms skewed heavily male, and for all the brilliant content, it wasn’t really designed to feel like an open door for the every girl just finding her way into this world. That’s not unique to one event; it’s most of the industry. And I say it as someone who loves this stuff and builds in it for a living: we have a long way to go on making these rooms feel like they’re for her too.

A month later I’m at Vogue Codes, which is the opposite room, full of exactly the women enterprise tech struggles to reach, and yet the conversation still didn’t quite hit the level I know it could. One kind of room has the access but not the audience. The other has the audience but doesn’t always push it. The summit that nails both, that gets the every girl in the room and sends her home able to talk about agentic AI like she owns it, doesn’t really exist here yet.It should. And it could be this one.

So Vogue, genuinely: call me. Let me help curate next year. Longer panels. Fewer of them. A real strand on what’s coming in retail and commerce and AI, taught in a way that makes a woman feel powerful rather than warned. Keep the humanity, it’s the soul of the thing, but pair it with capability so we walk out upskilled, not just inspired.

Because the women in that room already get it. That was never the question. The question is whether we’re going to hand them the soundbite or the toolkit.

Give them the toolkit. They’ll build the rest.

— Brooke x