August 21st, 2007

Digital Marketers See Green: Small Properties Gobbled Up

ClickZ, a respected source of information on interactive marketing that I admire just posted an excellent article discussing how “digital eco-marketing initiatives devoted to saving the planet – or at least talking about it in ads – has been picking up.”

The article, lengthy by online standards, covers more details than others I’ve seen from mainstream and industry media not specifically geared toward environmental or social issues, and hits some topics I’ve covered in this blog in recent months, including some of the articles in this issue of the Conscious Clicks newsletter.

ClickZ editor and author of the article, Zachary Rodgers, adeptly points out that mainstream green marketing efforts are crowding in on green marketing’s endemic advertisers — companies like Seventh Generation, Organic Valley and Method. This is one of a number of important effects from this trend that I’m analyzing in a white paper on green marketing I hope to release later this year (if interested in getting a copy, please email me).

Yet many blue chips hitting the green media circuit for the first time are finding the rules are a little different online.

As we’ve known for a while and have advised our clients, demographics don’t matter nearly as much as psychographics when it comes to green marketing, especially on the web. People who care about different issues such as the climate crisis, indoor air quality or fair trade, can be targeted directly with greater success than trying to reach them through channels with certain demographics in their audience like gender, age, etc.

Web marketing allows for dialogs – think email, blogs and social nets – and that’s driving a wave of recent consolidation in green market media. Online, that consolidation includes Discovery Communications’ purchase of TreeHugger.com, National Geographic’s acquisition of The Green Guide, and Gaiam’s acquisition of eco-lifestyles media firm Lime Media and Zaadz, a “LOHAS” social net. (Discosloure: The Green Guide and Lime Media are SRB clients; also, not a Hawaiin greeting, many of you already know that LOHAS stands for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability).

These dialogs between many authentic, green new-media companies and their engaged audiences can be powerful. As president of TreeHugger, Ken Rother says: “There’s this implicit trust between… TreeHugger and the reader. That trust takes a lot of work to build. It’s our belief that the advertising should have similar conceptual values to the content.”

Jakob Daschek is a founder and creative director of Syrup, the creative and production agency that worked with GE agency-of-record BBDO on the effort. He believes the U.S. market has become considerably more sophisticated about environmental issues since the campaign began 18 months ago.

“With the first launch of Ecomagination, we had this whole thing educating people about what the issues are,” he said. “Now we’re migrating it out into specifically what GE is doing, because people know at this point [about the issues], and they can benefit from knowing exactly what GE is doing.”

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