Other companies tried to align themselves with the Black Lives Matter protests and failed. The Vermont creamery kept doing what it’s always done.

On the bohemian poet’s hidden career as a prolific copywriter.

How did feeling good become a matter of relentless, competitive work; a never-to-be-attained goal which makes us miserable?

How a cartel invented and marketed the modern diamond.

For online advertisers, probably most of it. An investigation.

A talk on personal data and the people who collect it:

"Let me ask a trick question. What was the most damaging data breach in the last 12 months? The trick answer is: it's likely something we don't even know about."

An inside look at how an ad agency sells a car in 2015.

The $200 billion industry behind the Snuggie.

Marketing research,the pre-Facebook history of ‘likeability,’ and why there will never be a ‘dislike’ button.

An advertising copywriter adjusts to daily life in Paris, and works in a dysfunctional office.

Office culture in Paris held that it was each person's responsibility, upon arrival, to visit other people's desks and wish them good morning, and often kiss each person once on each cheek, depending on the parties' personal relationship, genders, and respective positions in the corporate hierarchy. Then you moved on to the next desk. Not everyone did it, but those who did not were noticed and remarked upon.

How the website mastered “Social Publishing”:

To understand some of the principles underlying BuzzFeed’s strategy, he recommends reading The Individual in a Social World, a 1977 book by Stanley Milgram, who is known, among other things, for his experiments leading to the six degrees of separation theory. “When some cute kitten video goes viral,” says [Jonah] Peretti, “you know a Stanley Milgram experiment is happening thousands of times a day.”

On the ever-expanding world of targeted online advertising.

An industry responds to the recession by rebranding the carrot as anything but vegetable.

How Viennese psychologist Ernest Dichter transformed advertising:

What makes soap interesting? Why choose one brand over another? Dichter’s first contract was with the Compton Advertising Agency, to help them sell Ivory soap. Market research typically involved asking shoppers questions like “Why do you use this brand of soap?” Or, more provocatively, “Why don’t you use this brand of soap?” Regarding such lines of inquiry as useless, Dichter instead conducted a hundred so-called “depth interviews”, or open-ended conversations, about his subjects’ most recent scrubbing experiences. The approach was not unlike therapy, with Dichter mining the responses for encoded, unconscious motives and desires. In the case of soap, he found that bathing was a ritual that afforded rare moments of personal indulgence, particularly before a romantic date (“You never can tell,” explained one woman). He discerned an erotic element to bathing, observing that “one of the few occasions when the puritanical American [is] allowed to caress himself or herself [is] while applying soap.” As for why customers picked a particular brand, Dichter concluded that it wasn’t exactly the smell or price or look or feel of the soap, but all that and something else besides—that is, the gestalt or “personality” of the soap.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”

George Lois never actually worked at Esquire, he simply designed the most iconic magazine covers of the 60s as a moonlighting gig while revolutionizing (and, generally pissing off) the advertising industry by day.

Where the actual online money is centralized, and where Google will have to go to continue chasing it.

A survey on where the industry is headed. Says one agency veteran: “Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it.”