Abstract
Coinciding with the special issue of Journal of Advertising on New Challenges to Advertising: A Call for Transformation, Well-Being and Positive Social Change (Zayer, Coleman, Chu and Gruber 2026), this special session brought together scholars and practitioners at the forefront of research and practice to build bridges between academia and industry and to activate future research related to an evolving advertising landscape. Sweeping technological, socio-cultural, and environmental changes as well as political uncertainty, are posing significant new challenges to advertising. At the same time, critics lament that advertising is ‘a vortex of misinformation and disinformation’ when it comes to ecological decline: ‘like a cuckoo in the nest, it pushes out from our imaginations the adjacent possibilities about different ways to live and organize the economy’ (Simms and Murray 2023, p. vii). Understanding how these disruptions are impacting advertising efforts that seek to be responsible, ethical, and inclusive proves to be more challenging than ever given the institutional dynamics of advertising (Zayer and Coleman 2015), often requiring a multistakeholder perspective to enable transformative advertising theory and practice (Gurrieri, Zayer and Coleman 2022). The session moderators and panelists participated in an interactive session with participants to discuss and debate the future of advertising amid these pressing issues and to set a transformative agenda for the future.