Earth at twilight. A digital photograph taken in June 2001 from the International Space Station orbiting at an altitude of 211 nautical miles. (Photo courtesy of NASA)
The first Earth Day in 1970 often gets credit
for jumpstarting the modern environmental movement.
Lately, Earth Day’s meaning might be changing a bit.
A lot of companies are running Earth Day ads and
offering special Earth Day shopping events. Rebecca
Williams reports the idea is that we can buy our way
to a better world:
Transcript
The first Earth Day in 1970 often gets credit
for jumpstarting the modern environmental movement.
Lately, Earth Day’s meaning might be changing a bit.
A lot of companies are running Earth Day ads and
offering special Earth Day shopping events. Rebecca
Williams reports the idea is that we can buy our way
to a better world:
You can’t watch TV lately without tripping over ads around Earth Day.
(Commercial montage featuring WalMart-SunChips-Home Depot)
And at the grocery store:
Campbell’s soup is wearing an Earth Day label. Campbell’s says condensing
soup means smaller, lighter cans. So, that means less waste. Of course,
they’ve been doing that since 1897. Long before Earth Day and the
environmental movement.
Even Barbie’s excited about Earth Day. She’s got a limited edition line of
accessories. They’re made from scraps of fabric that would otherwise have
been thrown away. She’s so crafty.
Of course, there’s a reason why it’s raining Earth Day ads.
“Companies advertise in ways they think people will respond.”
Tom Lyon directs the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at
the University of Michigan.
“Five years ago they didn’t think they were getting a whole lot of mileage
out of advertising green. Now you could say green is the new black – every
company is moving in this direction.”
Lyon says the reality of climate change has been more widely accepted in the
past couple years. People are wondering what they can do about it. And
companies are trying to tap into that.
Joel Makower has been studying green marketing for 20 years. He’s the
executive editor of Greenbiz.com. He says Earth Day marketing ebbs and
flows over the years. But he hopes Earth Day never turns into a marketing
event on the scale of Christmas.
“I think most people recognize the very clear reality that we’re never going
to shop our way to environmental health and so to the extent that Earth Day
becomes an excuse to consume, then we’ll have sent all the wrong messages.”
But Makower says a lot of companies actually are making big changes in their
practices and they should talk about that. He says Earth Day advertising
makes sense if the company’s doing something to improve all year long.
Otherwise he says it might just be a stunt.
Others think Earth Day as a marketing opportunity is probably here to stay.
Adam Werbach is the Global CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi S. It’s a major ad
agency. He says companies see Earth Day as another holiday.
“The reason that works so well this year – Easter came very early and there
was a large gap between Easter and Memorial Day so Earth Day fit in really
well so that stores could get through their Easter merchandise and start
putting green merchandise on the shelves and then move into Memorial Day.”
Werbach thinks that’s actually not a bad thing. He’s had feet in both
worlds – as a former president of the Sierra Club. More recently he’s been
a consultant for Wal-Mart. He thinks consumers should be the ones driving
companies to improve their practices.
“Our hope is of course that people who have tried these new products will
return and buy them in the next month so that in the end you’re creating a
cycle of demand for green products on shelves so that they don’t go away and
be a one time occurrence.”
But at the same time, Adam Werbach is a little conflicted. He wishes Earth
Day could be the one day of the year we could take a break.
No branding. No ads. No buying. Just Earth.
Hey… that might make a nice commercial.
For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.