Turning Agencies Against Fossil Fuel Brands Harkens Back to the Tobacco Wars

But activists and climate-focused marketers say the ad world is a long way from breaking with Big Oil

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When Lucy Glaser was interviewing for an early-career position at a well-known ad agency in Chicago in the mid-2010s, one of the first questions the interviewer asked her was this: “Would you consider working on a tobacco account?”

Glaser refers to that moment as the first “human crisis” of her career. The ad world can be hard to break into, and she was so close to landing the gig. Still, she did not want to lend her talents to an industry that was knowingly causing harm.

Glaser

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