Advertising Week New York 2026 runs October 5 through 8 at The Penn District in Manhattan, with more than 1,300 speakers and 500-plus sessions across four days, per the event's official schedule. Confirmed speakers include Kerry Washington, Gary Vaynerchuk, Flavor Flav, Bobby Lee, Sophia Bush, and Jackie Aina, alongside executives from Hilton, Southwest Airlines, State Farm, the NFL, The Hershey Company, Little Caesars, Stanley 1913, and Supergoop, per Barrett Media's August 19, 2026 agenda release. For PR agencies, the show is a four-day concentration of brand announcements, agency news, and executive media availability in one ZIP code.
What sessions are new at Advertising Week 2026?
Advertising Week added a Gaming Summit and a Healthcare Summit to its 2026 programming, per the event's official agenda preview. The Gaming Summit covers CMOs turning cultural moments into measurable brand momentum through sports partnerships and real-time creative. The Healthcare Summit covers how healthcare brands earn attention from audiences that do not respond to typical ad playbooks, signaling that both categories now compete for the same brand-safety and cultural-relevance narrative that used to belong only to consumer packaged goods. A B2B Summit track for independent agencies and SMB teams also joins the 2026 program, offering practical tactics for competing against larger agency holding companies on smaller budgets.
Who is speaking at Advertising Week New York 2026?
Kerry Washington, Flavor Flav, Bobby Lee, Gary Vaynerchuk, Sophia Bush, and Jackie Aina headline the confirmed speaker lineup, alongside Ben Cohen, per Barrett Media's August 19, 2026 report. Brand-side executives from Hilton, Southwest Airlines, State Farm, the NFL, The Hershey Company, Little Caesars, Stanley 1913, and Supergoop are also confirmed to participate, giving PR teams a concentrated list of named executives to pitch for comment or track for competitive intelligence. The mix of entertainment names and brand-side marketers is deliberate: Advertising Week programs celebrity panels to draw general-interest press attention to sessions that also carry brand and agency news, a strategy that widens the pool of outlets covering a given announcement beyond trade press alone.
Why does a four-day trade show matter for PR coverage?
Advertising Week draws roughly 80,000 connections across its four days, per the event's own attendance figures, concentrating agency executives, brand CMOs, and trade press into a single physical location. A named executive speaking on a Gaming Summit or Healthcare Summit panel becomes quotable, on-record source material for any reporter covering that vertical for the rest of the year. The agencies that get a client onto one of these stages convert conference attendance into a citable, dated placement rather than a networking photo.
What should PR teams track during the show?
Track which brand executives speak on which summit stage, since a Gaming Summit or Healthcare Summit appearance signals where that brand is investing its next communications budget. Track agency news announced around the show's opening, since Advertising Week's guaranteed press attendance is a low-risk venue for agency mergers, new client wins, or leadership changes timed to land while reporters are already in the room. Cross-reference speaker lists against EPR's PR agency directory to identify which agencies have clients on stage this year.
How should a PR team pitch a client onto an Advertising Week stage?
A PR team should pitch a client for a specific named summit rather than a generic speaking slot, since Advertising Week's programming is built around named tracks like the Gaming Summit and Healthcare Summit that each carry their own trade press following. The pitch needs to name the exact session theme the client's story fits, not just the client's industry, because Advertising Week's own programming team is matching submissions against a published editorial calendar rather than assembling sessions from scratch. A client with a specific, sourced statistic tied to their category, comparable to the kind of number a reporter would quote, stands a better chance of placement than a client offering only a general point of view.
How does Advertising Week compare to a B2B trade show like G2E?
Advertising Week draws a consumer-brand and agency audience across marketing, media, and creator disciplines, while the Global Gaming Expo draws a narrower B2B buyer audience of casino operators and slot manufacturers. Both shows reward the same underlying mechanic: a named executive, a verifiable announcement, and a press cycle timed to the show's opening days. EPR's coverage of G2E's booth reveals tracks how that mechanic plays out inside a single vertical trade show.
What comes after Advertising Week closes?
Advertising Week LATAM follows on November 3 through 5, 2026, and Advertising Week Europe returns March 22 through 24, 2027, per the organizer's published events calendar. PR teams running a client through the New York show can reuse the same speaker pitch and media list for the LATAM edition six weeks later, since many of the same agency holding companies and brand marketers attend both shows. A client's New York appearance also becomes a reference point when pitching the LATAM or Europe programming teams, since organizers favor speakers with a track record on other Advertising Week stages.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
