In the advertising business, marriages between independent shops and holding companies are often described as permanent unions, right up until they aren't.
The last time the advertising industry faced a regulatory inflection point with this much jurisdictional enthusiasm, it involved cookies, consent banners, and a four-letter acronym that sent compliance officers scrambling for interpreters.
The advertising industry has long believed that its people are constitutionally incapable of staying put — that creative restlessness is a feature, not a bug, and that turnover rates approaching 30 percent annually are simply the cost of doing business with people who think for a living.
The old saw about the stages of grief may need updating for the digital media age: denial, anger, bargaining, and then — if you are a large newspaper company — a licensing deal.
The advertising industry has long operated on a principle that might be called "learned helplessness" when it comes to account losses: they happen, they hurt, and then everyone moves on to the next pitch.
The pharmaceutical industry has never been accused of understatement, but even by its standards, the weight-loss drug market has become a phenomenon of unusual cultural velocity — the kind of thing that gets discussed at dinner parties, dissected on podcasts, and, not incidentally, advertised heavil