Signaling a sea change in the advertising business, four top-tier ad agencies are lining up to pitch to former Vice President Al Gore in hopes of landing the account for his Alliance for Climate Protection and helping Gore design a multimedia global warming campaign with a whopping $100-million annual budget. The takeaway, according to AdAge: Global warming is hot on Madison Avenue.

AdAge:

Many agencies do high-profile and often award-winning work for causes such as smoking cessation, drug-use prevention and disaster relief, but they typically steer clear of more divisive issues and political campaigns, making executives who want to work on them do so outside the auspices of the agency.

Until very recently at least, global warming would have been seen as such an issue. Long accepted by the scientific community, research suggesting human activity is raising the earth’s temperature with dire environmental consequences has been disputed by many in the business community, especially automakers and other sectors with big industrial outputs.

But corporate America has begun an about-face in the wake of a groundswell of popular interest, having seen what developing an environmentally friendly product such as the Prius has done for Toyota’s reputation and its bottom line. July’s Live Earth concert, whose proceeds are going to the alliance, was loaded down with corporate sponsors, among them Microsoft, whose MSN division had web rights to the show.

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