The other day, I saw an early sign of Spring: an election campaign commercial on TV. It was just a 30-second ad, but it did make me wonder how long it will be before more of them start showing up everywhere, even on streaming. With so many seats and offices at stake in this midterm election year, we’ll be bombarded with them. That’s why direct mail plays such a crucial role in modern campaigns. Mail has a built-in advantage. A well-designed piece consists of a strong headline, crisp, high-resolution images, and a focused message. It gets physically handled, read, and often saved. It doesn’t disappear with a click or get buried in an inbox.

The U.S. ad market expanded for its 13th consecutive month in April, rising 9.1% over the same month in 2023, according to the latest installment of data from Guideline's U.S. Ad Market Tracker. April also in the first month in quite some time to post an increase on top of a prior year increase, albeit a modest one: April 2023 was up 0.7% over April 2022. That said, the data indicates the U.S. ad market is well past its recessionary period and fully into an expansionary mode, with recent months rising at high single-digit increases or approach of surpassing double-digit ones.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley, a frequent critic of tech companies, has unveiled a bill that would require web publishers to avoid personalized advertising in order to maintain their protections from lawsuits based on users' speech. “Big Tech’s manipulative advertising regime comes with a massive hidden price tag for consumers while providing almost no return to anyone but themselves,” the Missouri lawmaker stated Tuesday. His proposed “Behavioral Advertising Decisions Are Downgrading Services (BAD ADS) Act” would strip large web companies of the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act if the companies either engage in what he calls “behavioral advertising,” or allow users' data to be collected for such advertising.