Articles from: Sustainability

Or as they say outside of the Roman Empire, Deeds not Words. Its a saying thats been around a while. And an ethos that is to be commended, celebrated and encouraged. So, when I sat down with a copy of the Guardian on Saturday I was faced with an existential crisis of massive proportions.

Honda had “taken all the advertising space in the first 11 pages in Saturday’s Guardian (and an entire ad break on Channel 4) as part of its campaign to get more members of the public to be “do gooders” regarding the environment” (see the full article here).

Brilliant sentiment, gorgeously illustrated. Made me want to watch the ad (which is sweet and cute and well, lovely)… until… it went on… and on… and on… page after page after page.

By page 11, I was steaming mad. Mad that Honda had just highlighted to me how much paper is wasted in those pages every Saturday with ads. Mad that what was a sweet story of discovery and action had turned into a rambling Oliver Stone epic; and most of all mad because if Honda REALLY wanted to do something for the environment then why not make a statement, buy the ad space and not print anything at all.

Imagine an ad-free paper, with a nice “Brought to you by Honda”. Save the 5 pages per Guardian you used with your pretty pictures.The PR you would get!  The readers would have thanked you. The trees would have thanked you (5 pages x 1.24 million - the average daily readership). And you would have been making a difference, instead of just making a noise.

Don’t get me wrong, as I said, beautifully executed work and the sentiment couldn’t have been more right, but its saying green rather than doing green, and both client and agency should have spotted that. In comparison to the Fiat Eco Drive, which is actually helping their drivers use less CO2, its just a load of hot (achingly beautiful) air.

There’s no escaping it, times are rough and tough.  We’ve been bracing ourselves and tightening our belts to the point where we’re running out of notches. Green shoots of recovery? Yeah, right.

Clients are shaking their heads as they ponder budgets for 2009. The IPA and other industry gurus will no doubt be knocking on their doors with some solid scientific evidence that cutting ad spend has a long-term detrimental effect. Will it be convincing enough? Partly. But accountability will be more important than ever.

We creatives can expect a rather large magnifying glass to hover above our heads, scrutinizing our work and looking to extract every last drop of value from it. Clients will be looking us straight in the eye and demanding, “hey smart Alec, stimulate me some green shoots,” as though it’s all our fault.

You can imagine agency presentations across town this year. They’ll be rather like the old Fairy Liquid TV ads. “Your previous strategy only washed this many dishes. Our fresh, new, lemon scented strategy will stretch your budget to this many dishes.”

We’re already seeing conventional reactions to the crunch; big football sponsorship deals being pulled, four figure global lay-offs, corporate art projects canned.

Spectacular big budget broadcast will be seen as spectacular, big budget wastage. “Open on a tropical beach? You’re having a laugh, mate. What’s wrong with Skegness?!” And that’s just in the tissue meeting. Increasingly throughout 2009 you will hear themes of empowerment, sustainability, innovation and inclusion surfacing in articles.

Industry old boys will continue distancing themselves from broadcast, “Did we say tropical beach? Noooo! Of course we meant Skeggie.” New kids will be hyping the relevance of ’social’ and ’service’ design. Digital agencies can go even further: “We open on user generated shots of Skeggie.”

Yet do we need to get all doomy and gloomy about this? Well, it’s not ideal. I’ve seen tropical beaches and I’ve seen Skegness and, with all respect to the Lincolnshire Tourist Board, I know which I prefer. Yet, the new economic climate does open up a very real creative opportunity.

The good news is that clients are on our side. They know that, as the crunch bites down hard, creativity needs to flourish.  Not just in the way it connects them with their consumers, but the way it helps run their business.  Working smarter, innovatively distributing content and creating cost-effective dialogues is now higher up the agenda than ever. CMO’s will be empowered to make the big balls decisions using “the current climate” to reinvent their approach to their budgets.

So let’s not disappoint them. We too need the balls to grasp the challenge.  Let’s reinvent the industry; move from Broadcast to Narrowcast. Embrace Branded Generosity. Be being bold enough to zig while everyone else zags. Connect with consumers by building believable brands; ones that stand up to the scrutiny of the empowered consumer.

Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist the Movie has got plenty of us talking in the LBi creative studio. Is it an Anti Capitalist conspiracy theory, or a glimpse of what comes after the collapse of the monetary system in the Crunch… a geothermally powered Resourced Based Economy courtesy of the Venus Project?

A wiser film maker may have steered clear of some of the ham-fisted emotive narrative techniques (the final ‘Times Square Revelation’ scene is worst of all). It’s true Zeitgeist isn’t perfect - there are some holes, it doesn’t have all the answers. But it does do a good job of raising serious questions and prompting debate. For this alone I recommend it highly… clear an evening and go work it out for yourself. 

Part 1: Zeitgeist the Movie (2007)

Part 2: Zeitgeist Addendum (2008)

(Qudos to JMT for getting there first and sharing).

The Times claim each google search contributes 7 grams of CO2 to the atmosphere, google responds almost immediately, some else exposes The Times’ shoddy journalism (probably using google). I’d like to see them do an analysis of the total CO2 emissions generated during the production of a single issue of The Times.