Commentary

My Take On Advertising, From Crackling Cold Ukraine

by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

We have a lot of work to do in 2026. AI threatens everything that we thought we knew in advertising. Ad-fueled “big tech” companies now have trillion-dollar valuations. And, wars and “special operations” are being fought around the world, innocents are dying, and prospects for more war and death are greater than prospects for less.

I write this from Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine, one of the world’s greatest technology hubs. It's very cold here right now, between 0°F and 10°F. The Russians are destroying the heat and power infrastructure, so many millions of Ukrainians have little or no heat.

Why so much about Ukraine in my columns? Because Ukraine matters. Ukraine is a microcosm of our world, our future -- and, yes, our industry.

Everything is digital. Ukraine is the most digital country in the world. Its “Diia” app has everything people need on theirs phones: ID, tax payments, work history, driver's license, health records, everything!

President Zelensky and Ukraine's Rada just appointed Mykhailo Federov, its longtime minister of digital transformation (“chief digital officer”) as its minister of defense.

Yes, in the middle of the greatest war the world has seen in 75 years, Ukraine is putting its faith in the digital guy to help it win. Of course, Federov built the Ukraine drone program and the marketplace for modern weaponry. So he knows how to fight the war with technology, not just by sending kids wet-behind-the-ears to the trenches.

It’s all AI. Many claim patronage of AI, but one thing is for sure: Ph.D.s have been issued at Kyiv Polytechnic University for almost 50 years in “computational linguistics” (large language models). AI is everywhere here, and everybody and their grandmothers studied them.

Advertising and democracy are joined at the hip. Advertising funds robust news, entertainment and information for everyone without the government controlling it. Democracy demands free media and an aggressive “fourth estate” of journalism. Advertising and democracy both feed and thrive in a world with free markets, robust capitalism and competitive commercial markets, where people can strive to do better on their merits. Ukraine has all that while Russia doesn’t, and Putin wants to change that fact more than anything.

It's happening now, in 2026. AI and LLMs are redefining business problem-solving, and consumer problem-solving is close behind.

Media from ten years ago is already obsolete. So connecting and understanding world issues is not just the right thing to do, it is essential to survive and thrive in the future. Even in the U.S., our oceans are no longer vast enough to prevent a Spider’s Web (look it up if you don’t know what it is) from happening in any city or facility in America.

Will you focus on getting better in 2026? To be clear: You either get better or you get worse. You never stay the same. What is your choice?

2 comments about "My Take On Advertising, From Crackling Cold Ukraine".

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Dan Manella from Stephens Media Group Tri-Cities, January 15, 2026 at 8:46 p.m.
Statements like “media from ten years ago is already obsolete” are not bold insights — they’re provably false generalizations made by people who don’t work with media that delivers real reach, real trust, and real results.

AM/FM radio reaches roughly 90% of U.S. adults, dominates in-car listening, and remains the most scalable ad-supported medium in America — exactly as it has for decades. People still drive. They still commute. They still listen. None of that disappeared because a new dashboard or AI headline arrived.

What’s obsolete isn’t media — it’s lazy thinking that assumes new technology automatically replaces human behavior. History is littered with that mistake.

In 1894, experts confidently warned cities would drown under horse manure within 50 years. They called it inevitable. They were wrong. Innovation didn’t destroy transportation — it evolved it. The Great Horse Manure Crisis wasn’t solved by declaring horses obsolete; it was solved by better systems.

Calling enduring media like radio obsolete smells a lot like that manure.

Radio isn’t “legacy media.” It’s infrastructure — resilient, trusted, and aligned with how people actually live. You don’t tear out infrastructure just because it’s old; you build smarter systems on top of it. Electricity isn’t obsolete because it’s old — neither is radio.

If the argument is that buying models, measurement frameworks, or integration strategies must evolve, that’s fair. They must.

But dismissing media with demonstrable reach and proven effectiveness as obsolete isn’t forward-thinking.

It’s historically ignorant — and factually wrong.
Reply

Dave Morgan from Simulmedia replied, January 16, 2026 at 12:41 a.m.

Dan, no question that my statement relative to media was a broad, over generalization and extreme. That was i's point. I personally work around linear TV advertising, and used to work in newspapers before entering the digital world, so I know well the power and resilience of older forms of media distribution. However, I don't think that anyone a few decades ago would have anticipated the develop;ment of trillion dollar value digital utility companies with profits fueled significantly or entirely by "commercial communication" (advertising) and every other media company in the world added up still pale in comparison to them. Thus, I call them obsolete because I don't know that they are survivable. I don't know how they will acquire customers, advertisers and the capital needed to serve them in this new media environment.