ENGAGING PRESENTATIONS
The people who
changed advertising.
Meet the people behind the campaigns. Explore what their stories reveal about creativity, culture, and understanding an audience.
Historian and author Jason P. Chambers connects Black advertising history with the questions agency teams face today: whose ideas get heard, how audiences are understood, and what shapes the work.
Featured speaking topics
Explore advertising history through the people, ideas, and creative decisions that changed the industry, and bring a fresh perspective to your team’s work. Have another topic in mind? Jason welcomes your ideas.
What Tom Burrell Understood About the Audience
Explore how Tom Burrell challenged assumptions about Black consumers and changed the creative work. His story opens a conversation about a question every agency faces: are we recognizing our audience, or relying on a stereotype?
Who Gets to Make the Ad?
Meet Black advertising professionals who fought for opportunity and helped reshape the industry. Their experiences invite teams to consider whose ideas reach the table, who gets credit, and how access shapes the work an agency produces.
What an Ad Assumes About You
Take a closer look at historical advertisements and the assumptions they make about identity, aspiration, and belonging. Consider what you notice first, what you might have missed, and how those readings can inform conversations about creative choices today.
What to expect
Stories about the people behind the work, a closer look at advertising, and questions worth discussing with your team. Jason connects historical research with familiar agency concerns: understanding audiences, recognizing assumptions, and making room for different perspectives.
His approach draws on more than 25 years of teaching advertising. Expect clear explanations and an invitation to consider more than one reading of the work.
Jason is a professor in the Department of Advertising at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the author of Advertising Revolutionary and Madison Avenue and the Color Line.