History

In 2011, business administration professor Amanda Bower got an e-mail from a former student, Laura Hornbuckle '07, who worked in public relations at Edelman. Hornbuckle said she'd had several Washington and Lee students contact her about how to enter the PR or advertising industry and she wondered if it might make sense for her to come down to Lexington and talk to them all at one time.

Shortly thereafter, Bower heard from Courtney Berry '05. Berry was working for Euro RSCG, had recruited several W&L students to come and work for her agency and thought the company might be interested in hiring more.

The wheels began to turn and Bower invited both Berry and Hornbuckle to campus that March for an informal conversation about the advertising, marketing and public relations industries. To round out the gathering, she reached out to several alumni at The Martin Agency-Marty Tompkins Ritter '04, Colton Payne '10, Lindsay Erickson '08 and Sarah Helms '07. She proposed they sit on a panel about how they had gotten into the industry and then maybe give more specific talks about their agencies and the work they did.

Alumni who had landed in the industry were eager to come back to campus and tell students their stories. They emphasized that advertising is an ideal career for liberal arts majors; to be successful, students needed to be creative problem-solvers and no place better inspired big ideas than Washington and Lee.

The program left alumni and students energized, and the following year, the annual AdLib Conference was born. AdLib, which can mean to improvise or to speak in an impromptu manner, was reclaimed as shorthand for "Advertising and the Liberal Arts." Professor Bower and others wanted to focus on the role of a traditional liberal arts education in the advertising profession. As the conference grew, it also expanded to include alumni in the adjacent fields of marketing and public relations.