If you're just biding your time waiting for the good old days of consumers' unrestrained spending -- or affluenza, as Yale's James Gustave "Gus" Speth puts it -- to return, you better figure out a way to market and monetize all the years you'll have on hand because things aren't going to be what they used to be anytime soon, according to two recent interviews. Speth, Yale's dean of environmental studies, tells Kai Ryssdal that our old habits of buying what we what whenever we want aren't sustainable. But, he claims, there are diminishing returns to affluence …

The draft for health-care reform outlined by the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee upholds the federal tax deduction for prescription-drug advertising, Merissa Miley reports. "This is a significant accomplishment, achieved in large part because of the outstanding grass-roots response of the advertising industry," Clark Rector, evp/government affairs for the American Advertising Federation, writes in a memo to members. L.A. Times columnist Dan Neil had no fear for the drug ad tax deduction since, as he points out, Big Pharma "disgorged more than $234 million upon Capitol Hill last year." Of more pressing concern, however, is …

A small tourism board promoting a little-known island off the Great Barrier Reef with a relatively paltry budget took home an unprecedented Grand Prix award in three categories -- direct, cyber and PR -- in Cannes last month. It also achieved stunning results, writes Rohit Bhargava, svp of Digital Strategy at Ogilvy PR. He formulates six lessons to be learned from the campaign. "Best Job in the World" was essentially an online job search conducted through social media for a new "caretaker" for Hamilton Island in Queensland, Australia. Most marketers don't have the luxury of such a beautiful destination to …

Russia has banned the depiction of people in commercials for beer for five years but marketers get around that by using off-screen voices or animated beer bottles to suggest a living presence in their ads. As part of a new clampdown on alcohol abuse, regulators are tightening rules, Andrew Osborn writes in the Journal, that are designed to make beer less appealing to young people. Communist North Korea, meanwhile, has produced its own "chirpy" contribution to the beer oeuvre -- a two-and-a-half-minute spot for Taedong River Beer. "We're shown a new vision of North Korea -- …