Catch the wave, don't build the wave

Earlier this week, a young Knicks fan named MD Ahnaf Hossai grabbed a microphone outside Madison Square Garden and riffed four lines: "My mayor Muslim, my bagel's Jewish, my Christian Dior, Knicks in four."

Within days, a city councilman was reciting it on stage at the 2026 Governors Ball Music Festival. By this week, it was being chanted at watch parties across the five boroughs, written up coast to coast, and adopted as the unofficial anthem of a city watching its team chase a first championship since 1973. Four impromptu lines from a fan on a street corner did what no agency, no brand, and no campaign budget could do. They captured a city's soul.

Nobody built that wave. Somebody caught it.

Keep that story in mind, because on Thursday afternoon at Estadio Azteca, Mexico kicked off against South Africa, and the largest cultural wave on the planet started rolling. The 2026 World Cup runs 104 matches across 16 cities in three countries over five weeks. Joseph Nye defined soft power as the ability to persuade without force or coercion, through culture, values, and attraction. The World Cup is five weeks of soft power supply, and every executive and founder I know is asking the same question: how do we get in on this?

There is a right way and a wrong way. This week delivered a textbook example of each.

Start with the right way, courtesy of two soccer clubs in cities that did not get a single World Cup match.

Detroit City FC is hosting free World Soccer Celebration watch parties across the city for every USA and Mexico group-stage match: USA matches at Campus Martius and the Detroit City Fieldhouse; Mexico matches at Los Galanes in Mexicantown. More than 2,000 tickets for the Campus Martius party were claimed before a single ball was kicked. FC Cincinnati is running the same play with its Summer of Soccer: free Soccer Celebrations at Fountain Square in partnership with 3CDC, watch parties across its pub partner network, and with craft beer partner MadTree.

Notice what neither club did. Neither bought a sponsorship. Neither pretended to own the World Cup. Both looked at a wave coming regardless, recognized that their cities were full of fans with nowhere to gather, and built the gathering. The tournament supplies the emotion. The clubs supply the room. That is riding the wave.

Now the wrong way.

On Wednesday, Jeep announced it will give a free Wrangler to the first 100 Americans legally named George Washington who register, if and only if the United States wins the World Cup. The campaign comes with a 60-second spot featuring a comedian as Jeep's "Chief Soccer Officer," along with artwork of George Washington crossing the Delaware in a Wrangler. The fine print concedes the promotion has no affiliation with FIFA or US Soccer. And bookmakers currently price a US world title at roughly 60-to-1.

Read that again. A giveaway contingent on an outcome the market says almost certainly will not happen, aimed at a prize pool defined by a name gag rather than by soccer fans, attached to a tournament Jeep holds no rights to. It generated a day of headlines, most of them in the "yes, really" register, and plenty of replies suggesting the marketing team should be shown the door. I will say it plainly: this is the kind of work that should cost a CMO his job. Attention without affection is not soft power. It is noise with a logo.

The contrast is the whole lesson. The Knicks chant was authentic and accidental. The Detroit and Cincinnati watch parties are generous and additive. The Jeep stunt is engineered and extractive. Two of the three will be remembered warmly in August. One will be a trivia answer.

This is the discipline of E-STOCK™, the communications operating system I run with clients, and it is no accident that the first letter stands for Event. The framework sequences six letters: Event, Strategy, Tactics, Organization, Consistency, and Know-how. Jeep started at Tactics, a stunt in search of a strategy. The clubs started at the Event, the moment when attention and emotion were already concentrated, and built organization and consistency around it. A surfer does not create the ocean. A surfer trains, positions, and paddles so that when the set rolls in, catching it looks effortless.

Three things this means for senior executives and founders over the next five weeks:

First, host rather than broadcast. If Detroit and Cincinnati can convene thousands without hosting a match, your company can convene the fifty stakeholders who matter to you around a quarterfinal. Generosity at the human scale beats messaging at the planetary scale.

Second, borrow emotion honestly. Attach your presence to the moment with a light touch and full sincerity. The chant worked because it was true to the person saying it. The Jeep stunt fails because it is true to nothing: not to the sport, not to the fans, not even to the brand's own customers. Stakeholders can smell a forced moment from a mile away.

Third, build the catching apparatus now. The best moment of this World Cup has not happened yet, and it will not be scheduled. It will be an upset, a celebration, a gesture, a chant. The companies able to respond with wit and grace within a news cycle will be the ones whose organization was drilled before the tournament started, not the ones convening a committee while the wave passes.

Catching the moment is the work of E-STOCK. Knowing which moments matter in your operating environment is SIGNAL's work. Knowing whose attention you actually need is TWIN's work.

The forces reshaping how companies are understood do not pause for the group stage: tariff volatility, supply chain disruption, competition from China, AI governance, export controls, the energy transition, and interest rate uncertainty all keep moving while the world watches football. Most senior executives and founders treat communications as a tactic for explaining decisions after they are made. The senior executives and founders who win in this environment treat communications as a strategy that shapes an audience's understanding before, during, and after a decision is made.

The world has changed. The wave is rolling. Be ready to catch it.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

— Marc

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Marc A. Ross | Founder + Chief Communications Strategist @ Caracal Global

The Communicating Caracal Global | June 12, 2026

June 12, 2026

Communications at the intersection of commerce and governments. Five issues, one win, one loss, and a Dow that moved 930 points on a social media post.

The lead: Trump announced a deal that Iran has not signed

On Thursday, President Trump canceled planned strikes on Iran and declared a peace deal close, "subject to finalization." The Dow jumped 930 points. Oil fell 4%. Gold hit a six-month low. Then Iran's semi-official Fars news agency said officials had not approved the text of any agreement, and Iranian state media claimed it was Washington that accepted Tehran's draft.

Strip away the geopolitics, and you have the cleanest communications lesson of the year: when you announce an outcome you do not control, you hand your credibility to the other side. Iran now decides whether Trump's statement was true. Every hour the documents go unsigned, the counterparty owns the narrative, and the 930 points of market enthusiasm become 930 points of downside exposure.

Additionally, this week, the NYT noted that Trump and Hegseth have repeatedly broadcast military strikes before they happen, a practice commanders avoid for obvious reasons. The pattern is the problem. Announcing first feels like strength. It is actually a transfer of leverage.

For senior executives and founders: never announce the close until the signatures are in place. If you must signal momentum, signal process, not outcome. "Constructive discussions continuing" survives a counterparty's denial. "Deal done" does not. Markets now trade your words as instruments. Price every claim before you publish it.

One typed page brought down a government's authority

UK Defense Secretary John Healey resigned this week over a defense investment plan he said would fall "well short" of what the armed forces require "at this dangerous time." The Times called his resignation letter "a weapon of mass destruction delivered on House of Commons notepaper." The armed forces minister followed him out the door. Starmer's authority may not recover.

Notice what Healey did not do. No leaks. No media tour. No anonymous briefings. One calm, specific, typed page, naming the gap between rhetoric and resources, released on his own timing. The restraint is what made it lethal. A letter with no adjectives left nothing for Downing Street to push back against.

Every senior departure is a communications event, and the person leaving usually controls the first frame. Companies forget this constantly. They negotiate the severance and the non-disparagement clause, then get out-communicated by a two-paragraph LinkedIn post. The lesson runs both ways: if you are the institution, agree on the exit narrative before the exit. If you are the one walking, write a calm letter. Specificity beats volume, and brevity reads as confidence.

Oracle and Bezos spent big. Only one knew how to talk about it.

Oracle reported higher quarterly revenue and profit. The stock fell almost 9%. The reason: $16.5 billion in quarterly capital spending, $55.7 billion for the year, and plans to raise another $40 billion in fiscal 2027. Investors did not punish the business. They punished the surprise.

In the same week, Jeff Bezos launched Prometheus, a $41 billion AI venture, while publicly batting down fears of mass job losses and promising "golden ages." Identical underlying behavior, enormous AI capital deployment, opposite market narratives. One company lets the spending read as a cost. The other framed it as destiny before the number was ever printed.

The gap is not the money. It is the sequencing. Oracle let the capex figure arrive naked in an earnings release, forcing analysts to write the story themselves. Investors who write their own story write a cautious one. Bezos preloaded the frame, so the spending confirmed a vision rather than raising a question.

For finance leadership and anyone telling a capital allocation story: the number is never the message. The frame around the number is. If a big figure is coming, narrate it early, repeatedly, and in terms of what it buys, not what it costs. The most expensive sentence in investor communications is the one analysts write for you.

Your opposition may be manufactured. The grievance underneath is not.

OpenAI disclosed a network of China-linked ChatGPT accounts that generated English-language posts designed to stir up local opposition to US data centers, posing as everyday Americans worried about electricity bills. The reach was small. The implication is large: a strategic American industry is now the target of foreign narrative manipulation at the town-council level.

Here is the uncomfortable part. The astroturf works because the grievance is real. Gallup finds seven in ten Americans oppose data centers in their own communities. A Times/Siena poll found more than a third of registered voters think AI is "mostly bad." Foreign accounts did not create that sentiment. They are renting it.

Which is why exposure alone wins nothing. Unmasking the bots does not lower anyone's utility bill. The companies that defend this buildout will be the ones answering the underlying complaint in local, material terms. Meta's new Workforce Academy, training fiber technicians, welders, plumbers, and electricians with guaranteed data center jobs at the end, is the right shape of answer: visible, local, denominated in paychecks rather than white papers.

The transferable lesson: when your industry faces manufactured opposition, fight the manipulation with disclosure, but fight the sentiment with substance. You cannot fact-check your way out of a feeling.

The ribbon-cutting that said more canceled than it would have said held

The $6.4 billion Gordie Howe International Bridge, paid for by Canadian taxpayers, named for a Red Wings legend, conceived as a monument to the US-Canada relationship, was due to open Friday. The ceremony was canceled. Invitations voided. "Outstanding issues" to resolve, which is diplomatic language for President Trump's grievances over cost and control.

A bridge is infrastructure. A ribbon-cutting is a form of communication. And the canceled ceremony is now communicating more powerfully than the one that was held ever would have: a six-lane, 1.5-mile metaphor for a relationship that cannot currently schedule a handshake. Prime Minister Carney said publicly the bridge would open this week. It did not. He now wears the gap between his statement and the outcome, which is the Iran lesson again, on a different scale.

For anyone planning launches, openings, signings, or celebrations involving a counterparty: a ceremony is a message you schedule in advance and cannot fully control. It amplifies whatever the relationship actually is on the day. Do not book the stage until the substance is locked, and always hold a quiet-postponement plan, because canceling loudly is a story and postponing quietly is a footnote.

Communications Win of the Week: Saronic Technologies

When a US Apache went down over the Strait of Hormuz, a 24-foot autonomous vessel built by Saronic plucked two aviators from the water, the first rescue of its kind by an unmanned craft. Within days, the WSJ ran an explainer on the $9.3 billion startup. Saronic did not issue the news. Its product performed in public, under the worst conditions, and the story wrote itself. The best press release ever written is the product working when it matters. Everything a communications function does should be in service of being ready when that moment arrives, because you do not get to schedule it.

Communications Loss of the Week: Vix

Mexico's most-watched streaming platform failed during the World Cup opening ceremony, the largest audience moment it will ever have, and subscribers are now publicly demanding refunds. The failure is operational. The loss is communicative: a platform that marketed itself as the home of the tournament went dark at kickoff, leaving angry customers to fill the silence. Your biggest moment is also your biggest exposure. If you sell yourself as the venue for the event of the decade, your crisis plan for that event needs to be as ambitious as your marketing.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

— Marc

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Marc A. Ross | Founder + Chief Communications Strategist @ Caracal Global

The Communicating Caracal Global is published on Fridays — a weekly memo on the communications stakes inside the week's business, political, and global news: who shaped the narrative, who lost it, and what senior executives and founders should take from both.

Caracal Global is a communications firm for senior executives and founders working at the intersection of geopolitics, commerce, and governments. Intelligence + Strategy + Communications.

Washington DC | Detroit | London

Apple just told you where the value went

Yesterday in Cupertino, Apple confirmed what everyone in the industry already suspected. The rebuilt Siri runs on a custom version of Google's Gemini, a deal Bloomberg pegs at roughly $1 billion a year. Think about what that means. The hippest and most vertically integrated company on Earth, the company that designs its own silicon rather than trust anyone else's, looked at the frontier model layer and decided to rent.

That decision landed in the same ten days that Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO, SpaceX targets a June 12 debut at a valuation reported near $2 trillion, and OpenAI signals it is moving soon. Analysts estimate the three offerings could pull north of $200 billion out of public markets - possibly this is why crypto is crashing right now. The entire US IPO market raised $45 billion in all of 2025.

Hold those two facts next to each other.

Record capital is flooding into the model layer at the precise moment the world's most demanding buyer concludes the model layer is sufficiently interchangeable to lease.

And the buyers are flinching.

Axios reported in late May that corporate America has hit AI sticker shock. Microsoft canceled most of its Claude Code licenses, partly over cost. Uber's COO called AI spending harder to justify. One consultant described a client who burned through half a billion dollars in a single month because nobody set usage caps. Gartner still projects global AI spending will reach $2.53 trillion in 2026. The money is not stopping. The patience is.

So here is the analytical question that matters for you, not your IT department: if the intelligence itself is becoming a commodity input, like cloud compute before it, like electricity before that, where does differentiation live? The market is answering. It lives in context, the proprietary data and workflows only you possess. It lives in distribution; the customer relationships are only yours. And it lives in the one asset nobody puts on a balance sheet: the ability to explain, credibly and consistently, what you are doing with all of it.

Three questions every senior executive and founder should be able to answer before the end of this quarter:

First, can you explain your AI spend as a return rather than a religion? The sticker-shock stories share one feature: leadership bought capability without building the narrative to justify it. When your CFO opens the invoice, when your board asks what the tokens bought, when an analyst asks the question on an earnings call, "we are investing in AI" is no longer an answer. It is an admission you do not have one.

Second, what happens to your AI story when the labs report quarterly? The IPOs change the information environment for everyone. Once OpenAI and Anthropic trade publicly, every model release, every pricing change, every miss gets marked to market in real time, and elite media will be hunting for the corporate customers exposed to it. If your AI strategy is publicly tethered to a vendor whose stock just dropped 30 percent, do you have language ready, or will you be drafting it the morning the reporter calls?

Third, who owns the narrative about what only you can do? Apple's answer was instructive. It rented the model and kept the customer, the device, the data, and the story. Your version of that answer exists. The question is whether it lives in a strategy document somewhere or in the mouth of every executive who speaks for you, in the same words, to Capitol Hill, to investors, to your own skeptical employees.

The world has changed. The way you need to explain it has not. Tariff volatility, supply chain disruption, NATO realignment, China competition, AI governance, export controls, energy transition, interest rate uncertainty: these forces are reshaping how companies are understood, not just how they operate. Most senior executives and founders treat communications as a tactic for explaining decisions after they are made. The senior executives and founders who win in this environment treat communications as a strategy that shapes an audience's understanding before, during, and after a decision is made, not just as an explanation after the fact.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc

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Marc Ross specializes in Geopolitics + Communications for global business, at the intersection of commerce and governments. Founder of Caracal Global, a communications consultancy serving Fortune 1,000 companies, private equity, and founder-led businesses; and Brigadoon, an intelligence network connecting founders and civic leaders since 2013. DET, WAS, EDI, LON. marc@caracal.global | marc@brigadoon.live | +1 202 596 5270

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