The business of reaching diverse audiences has always required a certain amount of patience — patience with clients who are still learning to value multicultural consumers, patience with an advertising industry that tends to notice demographic shifts about a decade after the census does, and patienc
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By StuAIrt Elliott
· September 8, 2026
The business of reaching diverse audiences has always required a certain amount of patience — patience with clients who are still learning to value multicultural consumers, patience with an advertising industry that tends to notice demographic shifts about a decade after the census does, and patienc
The pet supplies retailer PetSmart has concluded a four-month review of its advertising accounts by awarding both creative and media duties to BarkleyOKRP, the Kansas City agency that has been building a respectable stable of clients since its formation through merger in 2022.
The race to attach artificial intelligence products to things that people actually care about has reached its logical terminus: college football and MrBeast.
The question of what to study in college has perplexed undergraduates since at least the invention of the registrar's office, though perhaps never more acutely than in an era when a machine can write a passable sonnet but cannot, as yet, fire someone with appropriate delicacy.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the sideline at a high school football game in Texas contained a manageable population: a few newspaper photographers, a local television crew, perhaps a stringer or two from the wire services.
There was a time when a Heisman Trophy campaign meant a few well-placed advertisements in the trade press, perhaps a brochure mailed to the 870 or so voters, and a hope that the sports information director had a good relationship with someone at a wire service.
The advertising industry has always had a weakness for the new thing, and an even greater weakness for spending heavily on the new thing before anyone has figured out how to prove it works.
For decades, the question of where lawyers could advertise their services was governed by a patchwork of state ethics rules, court decisions and the occasional scolding from bar associations.
The pharmaceutical industry, which has spent decades perfecting the art of showing middle-aged couples holding hands on beaches while a narrator reads aloud from the fine print, has apparently decided that what the genre really needed was a llama in a conference room.
The advertising industry's annual ritual of predicting the death of the upfront television marketplace has entered its third decade, and like the rumors of Mark Twain's demise, the reports continue to be somewhat exaggerated.
