Summary: The advertising industry has been facing a “creative talent” shortage for quite some time. Agency executives feel that they cannot recruit the talent they believe they need, young professionals and junior copywriters who grew up in the Information Age think they know everything and deserve more than they should, and recruiters are stuck in-between, thinking that both sides have no idea what they want.

Summary: If your consumer doesn’t come to you, sometimes you have to use advertising to come to them. At least, that is what the Colorado Tourism Office (CTO) did this month to skiers. In parts of the west and mountain west, the weather has been pretty mild. Great for those who don’t mind a light snowfall, but terrible for the skiing business. According to the CTO, numbers across its 22-member resorts are down 10.65% compared to last year. It says that another reason for the drop could be the amount of in-state skiers who decided to stay away from the slopes. So the CTO relied on advertising. The tourism office placed the ad you see above in the New York Times, telling its readers that the heavy snowfall it received recently made it the best place in America to ski. Hopefully for them, it works. The ad was estimated to cost around $50,000, and it is the first time since 2002 the CTO made such a buy.

Summary: I am often reminded that most workplaces are not like ad agencies. I should say, they aren’t like agencies used to be. Even agencies have gone all HR and PC these days. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if an article like this one were forbidden on some agency servers today. What a shame. This business is too great to be like everything else.