A Former Portlander Is Raising Awareness About the Difficulty Faced by Young People Who Stutter

When Aaron Marshall left Portland for New York in 2020, his goal was simple: to work at one of the world’s top ad agencies. His other ambition: He wanted to talk about stuttering.

As he told his eventual employer BBDO in his job interview, “I, myself, have a stutter, and if we ever had the opportunity to do any work around this topic, like with some kind of nonprofit based in this realm, I would love to do that. That’s why I want to be in this industry: to change the way people look at the world.”

Marshall got his wish. He landed a job as a copywriter at BBDO and, with the agency’s help, developed a PSA for the Stuttering Association for the Young—SAY, for short—to raise awareness about the difficulty that young people who stutter face when speaking in everyday interactions.

The clip is simple: Children appear in front of ever larger audiences (from a classroom to a high school gym to a packed auditorium) and struggle through basic questions: “Can I substitute fries for tater tots?” “Do you have this in a size 8½?” The clip—with its closing message, “For kids who stutter, everyday sentences can take as much courage as public speaking”—has been viewed about 10,000 times on YouTube.

“I’ve had a lot of people reach out,” Marshall says, “to say, ‘It’s nice to see us represented in the right way. This is how we should be shown.’”