The First Ever Green Branding Class at the UO: My Takeaways

I just finished up with my very last finals of my college career and now have time to reflect on my last term at the UO! This term stood out to me particularly because of Deb Morrison's Green Brand Strategies class. While the end has come I thought it would be a good time to reflect on my four big takeaways from this class.

1. Green "branding" is dying out: Sustainability is the new goal. In class we quickly shifted from how to talk about companies "green" efforts to talking about how a company can achieve long-term sustainability. People are getting increasingly educated about environmental issues and are no longer fooled by companies "green" claims. They are looking deeper into companies core values and practices in order to choose the company that they can agree with (and purchase products/services from). The green advertising agency is changing from "talking" to "doing" and needs to push companies to become more sustainable before they talk about it.

2. Transparency: This goes hand-in-hand with the first one. Companies can no longer hide their bad practices behind an advertising campaign or slick branding. In this age of social networking people will find out if companies are spinning information or straight-up lying. The role of the green agency is to tell people the truth. This has to start with companies doing more to be more sustainable, so an agency can then inform people about it in a truthful way. Sustainability is impossible without transparency.

3. Sustainability is not a trend: In the coming years a lot of things are going to change for business. Resources are going to become more expensive, consumers are going to become more demanding, and businesses are going to become more competitive. Sustainability is not a trend, like green branding has become. Innovation and sustainability are the tools that are going to allow separate the long-lasting companies from those struggling to stay afloat. Those adopting sustainable practices now are getting a major head start on their competition and will be business leaders in the future.

4. Cooperation is a must: Sustainability is such a big issue that one person is unable to make a huge impact. We must cooperate to achieve sustainability goals. Businesses, agencies, media and people need to re-think how they can work together to achieve their goals without sacrificing the goals of others or the environment.

The coming years are going to be interesting. Those individuals, agencies and businesses that are honest, creative, innovative, caring, and cooperative are the ones that are going to be able to adopt sustainable practices and be the leaders of tomorrow.

Food waste, its impact, and what this means for sustainable business.

Saw this article on Treehugger the other day, its about the impact of food waste.

I've worked for a number of food service places and I was always surprised how much food gets thrown out due to spoilage or "bad" quality. This seems like a "low-hanging fruit" where a business, especially a small business, could save money and have a positive impact easily. Proper food waste management isn't extremely difficult but many restaurants do a poor job at it.

This is an important and easy way for a green branding agency to reduce a businesses environmental impact and show how sustainable practices can save a business money. I wonder if anyone out in the advertising world has addressed this problem?

Education, creativity and sustainablity

Time for another TED talk! This one is from Sir Ken Robinson. Its about schools, creativity, and sustainability.

After watching this talk I thought back on my own public school experience and realize that I most likely had a better situation then most.  I took photography, worked in our aquarium and had interesting and engaging conversations in an honors English classes throughout high school. In elementary school my parents were told that I may have ADHD because I would talk, draw, and cause a ruckus. The thing was, I didn't have ADHD, I was just bored. Elementary and much of middle school didn't engage me properly and I was not a good student. This all changed in high school.

In high school I had a number of caring teachers that pushed me and gave me more projects after I finished my class work. I also had an excellent photography class that I was lucky enough to be able to take my junior and senior year. I also was a head curator at our school aquarium, where I was constantly challenged with problems that needed creative solutions.

What I am trying to get at here is, I was on one hand challenged and on the other hand given the facilities to be creative. These are skills that have been extremely valuable as Ive gone through college and into the working world.

In essence I am living proof that what Sir Ken Robinson says is true. If my creativity was stifled I would have lashed out and most likely would not have gone to college. But since I was curious I had to go and learn about a variety of different subjects form oceanography, to philosophy, to digital art, to advertising. Now I have a knowledge-base that allows me to be creative and flexible.

Unfortunately most people don't have the luck of getting an excellent education as I have. This is where this relates to sustainability  and green branding. We need people to be creative and be accepting of new creative ideas. Much of our world's problems were caused (and are continually caused) by people who are inflexible in the ways they think. Being open-minded is our best tool for being sustainable.

As advertisers we want to do things smarter, more creative, and more sustainable but we have to have an audience that these things resonate with in order to do these things. We need a society where people are creative and thankfully I see our society shifting in a way that favors the more creative.

So if Sir Ken Robinson is correct if school is basically pre-job training, shouldn't we be teaching kids to be creative so they have a place in a society that is increasingly media and content driven? We have so many new problems that are not being solved by the institutions we have previously relied on, Shouldn't we be teaching kids to solve problems in innovative and unique ways. In essence letting their creativity and special skills shine.

The Meatrix- How Does this relate to green-branding?

One of the most successful viral videos of all time (with over 15 million views) promotes a vegetarian lifestyle and sustainable foods while criticizing large scale agri-business and factory farms.  Its called The Meatrix.

It is aimed at educating people about the effects of large-scale factory farms in a way that is entertaining and accessible to all audiences of all ages (and most nationalities, its been translated into 39 different languages). It was created by Free Range Studios, a "messaging firm" that also created the shorts "The Story of Stuff" and "Store Wars". It seems that the goal of Free Range Studios is to get to educate and motivate people to action with their funny (if cheesy) short films.

So what does this have to do with green branding? It shows how a small independent media producer like Free Range Studios can educate large numbers of people using only the internet and viral video campaigns.

It also emphasizes a particular trend of more educated consumers, people who are starting to wonder where their food comes from. People are starting to pay attention to the impact that their food is having and are starting to think that there is a better way to do things than the "conventional" one.

This trend is gaining ground. There have been a number of  documentaries discussing food origins: King  Corn,  Fast Food Nation and popular novels such as "An Omnivoure's Dilema".

What does this mean for us as advertisers? More educated consumers that are demanding better products from better companies.

Adam Werbach in Person (kinda)

Wednesday in class we got to meet face to video screen with Adam Werbach.  Here's a couple of takeaways I got from our interaction:

• Like record companies and purveyors of gas-guzzling SUVs (Ahem..GM), The old advertising industry is dying a rapid death. Due to the availability of information and the ability to broadcast your opinions to the world, people are calling bullshit on advertising to the point where it is affecting sales. People just don't want to be "sold" to anymore. Sustainability has the potential to save the advertising industry by making agencies the purveyors of change, not pushers of products.
• "The best tool you have is knowing nothing" Werbach emphasized having an opoen mind and that the new generation of advertsing (us) have an advantage because we are not stuck doing things "the old way." We can be mentally and creativly flexible. These are essentails if you want to push change.
• "Greenwashing is bad marketing" and is also dying a rapid death for most of the same reasons that the old ways of advertising are dyding. You just cant trick people anymore.
• Sustainability starts within a business long before they should communicate about it. The time to communicate about a companies sustainability is at the "point of no return." This is when a company has integrated sustainability deeply in their business and have made capital investments which guarntee they follow through. The "point of no return" is a different time for every compnay.
• While Werbach said there are a few industries that are "inherently evil" namely, oil, tobacco, and bottled water companies, the majority of currently unsustainable businesses can benefit from adopting sustainable practices. Yes, even companies like Wal-Mart and McDonalds. 
• Regarding sustainable practices, companies are not asking the question, "should we do this?" but "how do we do this?" This is a big shift from just a few years back.
• Despite is flaws, our current industrial/economic model has done much to bring about social/economic justice and well-being to large numbers of people. This model needs to be "re-energized" with sustainability (social, economic, environmental, and cultural) guiding it, if it is going to continue being successful.

One thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is how the relationship between ad agency and client is changing. Talking to Werbach helped me realize that agencies need to work very closely with their clients in order for them to promote their sustainable practices.

So closely that maybe the agency model needs to be changed. I think that in the years to come we will see that internal client-side advertising/sustainability initiatives will take off as opposed to ad agency-based external ones. It seems that Saatchi S, Enviromedia, etc. are now occupying a niche in the agency world that is going to soon go mainstream and may even disappear. Just a thought, but I am interested in seeing where things are going to go!

Thank you Adam Werbach for the inspiration and insight!

Organic Ceritifications: What Do They Mean?

So I've been curious about organic certifications and how/if the different ones use different criteria. This was prompted by my interest in doing a campaign for Oregon Tilth with a few colleagues and we needed to find out what differentiates one organic certification from the next. So I did a bit of research, and here are 4 of the major organic certifications that are used in the western U.S. and how they are different and the same.

OTCO: Oregon Tilth uses the Organic certifications laid out by the USDA's National Organic Program and certifies crop production, wildcrop harvesting, livestock production, and handling production (such as restaurants). Oregon Tilth also provides certifications for a number of different organic certification programs including the European and Canadian ones.  Oregon Tilth, however, is more than just a certification agency they are also a nonprofit organization that provides education and advocacy for organic farms and farmers. Some of the companies certified organic by OTCO include: Organically Grown Company, Kettle Chips,  Annie's Homegrown,     Organic Valley and Laurelwood brewery.


CCOF: California Certified Organic Farming was one of the first organic certification programs. It has its own guidelines for organic certification but it is also recognized by the USDA program. CCOF also has a trade association and a foundation which is concerned with education, research, and advocacy. Interestingly CCOF was originally a group of farmers that had their own published standards and certified each other. Also their standards were the foundation for the USDA ones.


QAI: Quality Assurance International is a U.S. based organic certification program and is "the leading provider of organic certifications worldwide." Again it uses the USDA's criteria for certifying organic products. They certify a (very) long list of different companies.

OCIA: This is one that I'd never heard of before starting my research.  The Organic Crop Improvement Association provides Organic certifications and "access to organic markets." They seem like the most international of the organic certification organizations I looked at and are accredited by the USDA, IFOAM, JAS, CARTV, and MAG. They have been around since 1985 and are a non-profit, and member owned "agricultural organization" which is again concerned with education and research. They also certify a huge number of different producers and products.

Conclusion: Well by comparing these four programs I yielded way more similarities than differences (at least with the criteria that I chose to compare them with). They are all non-profits, they all go by USDA organic standards,  have active research and education campaigns and are all member controlled. This is awesome becasue it means that the different organizations are all cerifying to the same standards, guarantying that the porducts are actually organic. They seem like they are unified in their quest to produce better organic products and educate consumers and are not in direct competition with one another. They also all seem to serve their own regions even if they are international.

I think that if I dug a bit deeper I would find bigger differences associated with costs, scale and etc. but at least the most important fact to consumers, quality of certification, seems to be excellent across the board.

Sustainable Business Practices-Talking With Tom Osdoba

I would have posted this earlier but Ive been dead sick all weekend.

Anyway, Tom Osdoba , the director of the center for sustainable business practices at the UO, came and spoke to my green branding class last Wednesday, it was nothing short of inspirational.

After we hashed out some definitions of sustainability, he began to outline what a sustainable economy looks like. A sustainable (or alternatively conservation) economy is equally balenced on all sides by social capital, natural capital and economic capital. It uses all these capital resources wisely and gives back to all of them at the same time.

He also explained that we need to approach our environmental problems with humility and realize that we are not going to be able to "fix" every problem we created. Instead we need to start acting like the "native species" that we are. he further emphasized that how we are living currently is "incongruous with being native."

Tom then began to show us how the biggest challenges to sustainability are institutional. He emphasized how, if businesses started thinking long term, sustainable practices become more than cost effective, they become profitable.  Tom also emphasized that change doesn't some about easily and it needs 3 major steps before someone (or more importantly, some business) will take action: concern + best practice+ institutional capacity= action.

I found Tom's speech inspiring on two levels.

One it showed in concrete ways how business and economic powers are the ones that have the ability to change things for the better. This is similar to what Adam Werbach talks about in "Strategy for Sustainability" and it begins to show me that maybe through business and economics (and of course advertising) we can begin to make some of the positive changes we so desperately need.

And two, it touched on ways to effective communicate to people about sustainability issues. Tom talked about getting residents of Vancouver to ride their bikes one day out of the week and instead of framing this as a sacrifice (which of course riding a bike never is) he used value messages to compel them. The key values he emphasized were: quality of life, natural environment, more time with family and friends. I believe this is important because we need to stop telling people to "make sacrifices" for the good of the environment and show them how living sustainably drastically improves your quality of life.

This is the message we need to drive home with all of our communications about being "green".