Sixty percent of Americans live in rural communities, those with a population of 50,000 or fewer. This data point, which can be found by digging into the US Census, is very important for our country. When you think about it, it explains a lot. Specifically in advertising, it’s a reminder that if we craft campaigns and ideas only in big cities, with people from only big cities, we risk producing output that doesn’t connect with a broad enough audience.
At its best, creativity unites. It’s the story, the joke, the meme, and the idea that many different people relate to and share. The more people you can get around something creative, the more successful an idea will become, and the more impact it will have.
This is an area where independent agencies located outside major metropolitan areas can help the industry. Kids growing up in rural areas often have no idea that advertising is a career, yet there are just as many creative-leaning kids there.
Regional independents are in a great position to seize this significant opportunity: they have the access and local cred necessary to develop rural outreach programs in their communities, introducing high school students to advertising, and letting them know that advertising is there. These programs are an amazing way to combine creativity and business, and to consider it as something to do in life.
Here are a few ways to run such a program:
-Target high schools in rural communities where over 50% of students receive free or reduced-priced lunches as a result of being from significantly low-income households.
-Choose high schools that are at least a 30-minute to 1-hour drive from your location. This permits easy scheduling, like a regular meeting.
-Work with the school to organize an agency visit, a lunch or break time discussion, or an extracurricular event often involving pizza.
-Explain all the different roles that exist at an agency: from technology people, to account managers, to writers, designers, media buyers, strategists, and beyond.
-Share the news that not all roles in an ad agency require a traditional 4-year college degree. This is an important point. Affording and accessing traditional colleges is a large barrier in rural areas.
We run such a program at our agency, and we find that people who join these sessions are partly what you’d expect, and partly what you wouldn’t. Yes, we see students who show their creativity in the way they dress and project themselves, but they are joined by athletes in their letter jackets, student council members, and nearly every slice of high school students you can imagine. We also find a level of diversity in the room that over-indexes relative to the total high school diversity.
Every time I’m talking with a class in a rural area, I’m reminded of the quote from food critic Anton Ego in Ratatouille, a movie my kids love: “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.”
John Drake is President & Chief Strategy Officer at Drake Cooper, a Boise-based independent agency that was named to the 2026 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. It is the largest 100% employee-owned agency in the West.
