The fast-food wars have always been fought on two fronts: the one where you try to sell more hamburgers, and the one where you try to convince people you are the kind of place that sells hamburgers worth buying.
SE
By StuAIrt Elliott
· June 17, 2026
The fast-food wars have always been fought on two fronts: the one where you try to sell more hamburgers, and the one where you try to convince people you are the kind of place that sells hamburgers worth buying.
The dream of advertising's next frontier — the conversational commerce assistant, where a shopper asks what to make for dinner and receives, along with the recipe, a gently sponsored suggestion to add Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup to the cart — turns out to be almost entirely a dream, at least f
The advertising industry has long prided itself on being a people business, which makes the latest census from Ad Age something of a contradiction in terms.
The pharmaceutical industry has long understood that awareness campaigns work best when they appear to be selling nothing at all — or, more precisely, when they are selling the category while leaving the brand name to be discovered later, perhaps in a doctor's office.
The business of knowing the right people has always been valuable on Madison Avenue, though the definition of "the right people" has shifted somewhat since the days when that meant knowing which creative director to call at Doyle Dane Bernbach.
The British government, faced with a generation that has come to view the teaching profession as something one settles for rather than reaches toward, has decided to reframe the pitch entirely: teaching, the new campaign suggests, is where you go to feel alive.
The line between an athlete endorsement and a digital billboard continues to blur, and a company called MOGL is now offering to erase it almost entirely.
