Consider this our slightly more productive version of an out-of-office message.
If SGNLWRKS seems unusually quiet next week, there is a good reason for it: we’re taking the week off.
Well, sort of.
From October 5–8, the SGNLWRKS team will be at Advertising Week New York 2026, joining thousands of people from across advertising, marketing, media, technology and culture for four days of conversations about where this increasingly strange industry is heading.
That means we won’t be publishing our usual stream of articles during the week, because occasionally the people writing about an industry need to stop writing long enough to actually spend some time inside it.
We’ll be sitting in sessions, talking to marketers, meeting agency leaders, pestering smart people with questions, hearing what brands are actually worried about and probably having more conversations about AI than any reasonable person should experience in a four-day period. More importantly, we’ll be listening for the things happening underneath the official talking points: the ideas marketers are genuinely excited about, the problems nobody quite knows how to solve and the contradictions that tend to make for the most interesting SGNLWRKS stories.
Advertising Week New York arrives at an interesting moment for the industry, with hundreds of sessions spanning AI, creativity, commerce, media, technology, culture and the creator economy. Many of the questions running through those conversations are the same ones we’ve been exploring here all year, from the changing meaning of attention and brand authority to invisible customer journeys, agentic commerce, measurement, creators and the growing tension between technological capability and actual human behavior.
So we’re going to spend a few days absorbing it rather than attempting to comment on every development while it happens.
Then we’ll come back.
Expect plenty of new ideas, arguments, observations and probably a few opinions about what everyone got completely wrong.
SGNLWRKS will return to normal programming after Advertising Week New York. Hopefully a little smarter, almost certainly more opinionated, and with a very long list of things we need to talk about.