I read something today which made my skin crawl. One of the world’s biggest advertising agencies, Ogilvy, is expanding their specialist sustainability advisory branch – Ogilvy Earth – to Asia, the US and the UK.
You might wonder why I have a problem with this, considering my blog is all about promoting green business.
Well, as with many things, less is often more. And that couldn’t be more true than when it comes to marketing green business initiatives. I would always trend towards doing more, and saying less, than the opposite. Unfortunately, Ad land hasn’t always been great at under-selling.
Sure there is a place for promoting your sustainability initiatives or green credentials, but you always run the risk of being labeled as ‘greenwashing’ – or slapping a nice coat of green paint over some bollocks to make it look better than it really is.
Saab was in trouble not that long ago for its ‘grrrreen’ campaign, which used taglines like “Every Saab is green. With carbon emissions neutral across the entire Saab range”. 
The ACCC took them on, claiming this was misleading, given that the ‘carbon neutrality’ was based on them offsetting the average emissions from only one year of driving – not the whole life of the car. The Federal Court agreed, and made them take down their ads, retrain their staff and plant enough trees to offset the lifetime emissions from every vehicle sold during the campaign. Not the most successful advertising campaign I would think.
Maybe Ogilvy is smarter than that, but from a quick look on their website, I’m not convinced.
They have a nice case study on how they helped Qantas set up their ‘begreen’ campaign, which focused on cutting paper use, and switching off lights and rooftop signs in their offices. These are all fine initiatives, and everyone should be doing them, but do you really want to sing and dance about switching off your rooftop sign when you have fleets of 747s flying around the planet, belching millions of tonnes of CO2 each year? (12.2 million tonnes to be specific, according to their last CDP report).
You could make a similar claim against BP, who painted buses all over Sydney (and probably elsewhere – I don’t get out enough) with logos about how they had switched to fair trade coffee in all their service stations. Yeah that’s great, but is that the best way to reduce your social impacts? Not by a million miles (no pun intended). BP is actually doing some great things to move ‘beyond petroleum’ but spending big on advertising campaigns like this is a step in the wrong direction as far as I am concerned.
People are smarter than that, and want to see real initiatives which make a big difference to your company. Don’t just tinker around the edges and try to make it more than it really is.
Check out this other Ogilvy campaign for the Environmental Defense Fund, which piggybacked on cool New York artist Joshua Allen Harris, to create this:
Talk about depressing. Take the subway or you are going to kill a polar bear.
I don’t think you will be successful by trying to motivate people via guilt. It’s too easy to switch off and pretend you didn’t see it. How many of you change the channel when the ‘sponsor a child’ commercials come on?
If you are going to engage an advertising company to spruik your green initiatives, you better keep them on a tight leash, or you will have the ACCC breathing down your neck in no time. What’s more, you risk alienating your customer base, who will see you as out of touch.
Take my advice – do more, say less.
[...] Lawyers say these sorts of claims are really a case of false advertising. See my earlier post ‘Ad Land to the Rescue?’ for my take on greenwashing in [...]