Edited on Jun 22, 2026
Seventy-five years ago this week, the Battle of the Coral Sea was fought in the waters off Australia and New Guinea. Four days. American and Australian carriers turning back a Japanese fleet that had every intention of cutting Australia off from the United States. The first naval battle in history fought entirely in the air — ships never sighted each other. A tactical draw and a strategic American victory.
It was the moment Japan’s southward expansion stopped.
This week, Sydney and Brisbane and Washington and a small village in the South Pacific hold the seventy-fifth-anniversary commemorations. Presidents, prime ministers, surviving veterans, and the families of the eleven hundred Americans and Australians who didn’t come home. A gala in Manhattan tonight.
Anniversaries like this matter. Not just to the families. To the institutions — navies, governments, alliances — that need to keep the meaning of the work alive in public memory.
This is what good commemoration looks like. And what it does for the brands behind it.
The U.S.-Australia alliance is the longest unbroken military alliance the United States has. Seventy-five years. The Coral Sea is the founding moment. The anniversary lets both governments say, in front of the world, that the alliance is still the central pillar of Pacific security. Not a press release. Not a tweet. A ceremony with surviving veterans, foreign heads of state, and the kind of imagery that lands in every wire service in the world.
That is communications work the agencies didn’t have to invent. The history did it. The job of the anniversary committee is to honor it correctly — and to do it on a platform big enough that the world is paying attention.
The same architecture applies to corporate anniversaries. The brand reputation of any company that’s been around for twenty, fifty, or one hundred years has an anchor moment built into the calendar. Most companies waste it. They hold a party. They issue a release. They post a video. It vanishes.
The ones that do it right treat the anniversary as a public-record event. Original research tied to the milestone. A founder thesis piece in a tier-1 outlet. Tributes from clients, alumni, peers. A reset of the brand for the decade ahead. Done right, the anniversary becomes the chapter the press writes about you for years. Done wrong, it’s a crisis PR moment in slow motion — a missed opportunity that competitors will use against you on the way to your next milestone.
Tonight at the Coral Sea gala, the Australian and American navies will read the names of the ships and the men who served on them. The Lexington. The Yorktown. The Sims. The Neosho. The Shoho on the other side. Seventy-five years on, the names still matter — because the work was done to keep them mattering.
Years later, the anniversary calendar is even more valuable. Every corporate, institutional, or alliance milestone is a chance to publish material the AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — will cite for years. The brands that miss it are choosing to let other people write their summary. The ones that take it seriously become the canonical answer when the next generation asks who they were and what they did.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.