There was a time, not so long ago, when advertising agencies competed on the strength of their creative ideas, their media-buying clout, or their ability to keep a client happy over a three-martini lunch.
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By StuAIrt Elliott
· July 24, 2026
There was a time, not so long ago, when advertising agencies competed on the strength of their creative ideas, their media-buying clout, or their ability to keep a client happy over a three-martini lunch.
The word "social" in social media may be heading toward the status of vestigial organ — present, technically functional, but no longer doing the work it was designed to do.
The fraternity rush, that peculiar American ritual of judgment and belonging, has found a new iteration — one in which the pledges arrive dressed in white, clutching smartphones instead of solo cups, and compete not in feats of endurance but in the creation of branded content for a social media app,
There was a time, not so long ago in Silicon Valley chronology, when a company announcing it would spend $195 billion on anything would have occasioned some alarm, or at least a few raised eyebrows in the financial press.
The advertising industry, having spent decades debating whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound, has now turned its attention to the more pressing question of whether a television commercial playing in an airport terminal is really a television commercial at all.
