Authentic, verifiable positive impact behind concrete action is the true ticket to winning the hearts, minds, and brand preferences of today's green-minded consumer. By the same token, greening your brand communications requires far more than a few mere edits on a page. Here are four key elements to creating a smart, effective media strategy that wont call your green cred into question. By Matt Heinz

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To truly make your company's practices more sustainable, you have to change how you do business. The good news is that you don't have to wait for product manufacturing and supply-chain changes (which can take a long time) to have a material, carbon-cutting effect on your business, and your marketing in particular. By examining various elements of your media plan, you will uncover several significant opportunities to reduce your marketing department's carbon footprint all while maintaining and in some cases increasing the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Creative Development

The resources required to build creative in the first place can itself create significant carbon emissions. If you (and a crew) have to fly to an on-location site to film your new TV campaign, if your campaigns go through countless unnecessary drafts and iterations in the editing room, if you commission new photography vs. using existing artwork, all of these and more will significantly increase the carbon effect of your creative.

Is your agency across town or across the country? How often do you meet in-person vs. via email, phone, or even video conferencing? How many courier services do you use to shuttle drafts back and forth to each other?

Once the creative is finished, whats required to bring that creative to market? Are you shipping dozens of beta tapes to TV stations across the country? Or are you emailing (or sharing via an FTP server) the creative files in electronic format?

These are just a sample of the decisions, and trade-offs, to consider simply in the campaign creation process. Some of these decisions can have a greater carbon impact than others, but collectively they can have a significant impact.

Channel Mix

This is a tough one, as the media channels you choose will often be determined both by the audience youre trying to reach and influence, plus the effectiveness of the channel itself in delivering results. Smart marketers are evaluating and triaging campaigns in real-time based on performance (cost-per-lead, transaction rates, awareness penetration to a target audience, etc.), and those metrics are indifferent to carbon outputs.

That said, knowing which channels are green-friendly, and which arent, can color your initial channel decisions, and ultimately be leveraged right into your messaging to increase the effectiveness of every channel.

It seems intuitive that television isnt a very carbon-friendly channel, and the statistics back that up. Our flat-panel and plasma televisions are among the worst energy hogs in our households, and the infrastructure required to bring that 30-second TV ad from marketer to viewer is extensive.

Online advertising really isnt much better. Energy-sucking servers house and distribute online ads to energy-sucking PCs and monitors. The overall carbon footprint is less than TV, but is still significant.

Mark Jones, president and creative director for Jones Advertising in Seattle, Wash., adds the following for additional, traditional media channels:

• Newspapers, direct mail, and other print media take a lot of energy to create, and they kill trees, but a large portion can be recycled (well discuss disposal more specifically later).
  


• Radio offers marketers one of the lowest costs per thousand, and uses the brain itself to paint the picture. A good piece of creative on the radio, and you've got a low cost campaign. The energy used in the process is less, too. It takes far less energy to transmit a radio vs. television signal, and less energy is used to listen to a radio speaker than to watch a TV.
  


• Ironically, the outdoor billboard, which at one time was seen as a form of pollution on the sides of roads and highways, in reality gets a ton of viewership, but uses very little energy. If its a daylight only billboard, it is posted once, can stay up for months, and get hundreds of thousands of viewers with a single posting. As far as energy per viewer, this offers an incredibly low carbon footprint, although it does rely on a busy highway for viewership, and the message is limited.
  


• Mass-transit advertising can offer your media plan access to a high-volume audience, and the association with green-friendly transportation itself can be parlayed into your message.
  

Consumption & Interaction

The most passive media campaigns typically have a lighter footprint. If your audience only needs to experience your advertisement, energy consumption ends after the ad is created and communicated.

Many of todays ad campaigns, however, encourage interaction. Its what makes todays marketing opportunities particularly exciting and powerful for marketers.

Unfortunately, that post-advertisement level of interaction can create a new, high level of carbon impact. The energy required for that interaction is unavoidable, but consider the significant savings of exponentially increasing the volume of post-ad consumer interaction and pass-along.

If every ad you place, for example, compels a significant number of recipients to share that experience (or something related) with their own personal or professional network, youre extending the impact, performance and efficiency of a smaller number of ad placements with similar (or higher) results.

The hidden savings opportunity in media consumption is, therefore, largely related to campaign performance. The more effective your campaign, the less it needs to run, and the less energy is required to complete it.

Put another way, the quicker your message compels an audience to take action, the shorter the campaign itself. And the more you can compel your primary audience to do work for you (in sharing your message with their own networks), the better for you and the environment.

No matter what your media mix, message efficiency can have a significant effect on carbon emissions.

Disposal

Consider the following, primarily related to direct mail (from 41pounds.org):

• The average adult receives 41 pounds of junk mail each year (about 560 pieces), and 44% goes into the garbage unopened


• Junk mail inks have high concentrations of heavy metals, making the paper difficult to recycle


• $320 million in local taxes is used to dispose of junk mail every year


• Californias state and local governments spend $500,000 each year collecting and disposing of AOLs direct mail discs alone


• The transportation costs of delivering junk mail costs $550 million a year
  


• The energy used to produce and dispose of junk mail each year exceeds the carbon impact of 2.8 million cars
  

The carbon impact of a media campaign after its been experienced by your audience is significant. Whether the byproduct of your campaigns is renewable and recyclable, or mostly solid waste, can be impacted by some smart decisions up-front in the planning and production process.

Hydrogen Advertising in Seattle recommends the following considerations to make consumption and particularly disposal of your media campaigns more environmentally friendly:

• Utilize full or partially-recycled paper stock when printing direct mail, trade show materials and any other printed marketing


• Give consumers a choice on how they want to communicate with you (email disposal is far more green-friendly than paper and physical goods)


• Use vegetable and soy-based ink (prices are competitive, and most printers offer them if you ask)


• Use an eco-friendly printer (one that incorporates its own carbon-friendly production practices)


• Use the DMS do-not-mail list (decrease non-anticipated solicitation to create less waste and increase your campaigns effectiveness and response rates

Your ability to leverage these recommendations will depend heavily on your incumbent media plan controls, as well as your campaign objectives (i.e. brand vs. direct response). However, with some careful thought and dissection of the stages, costs and impact of every stage of the development, distribution, consumption and disposal of your campaigns, there is surely a significant amount of cost, energy and carbon savings to be had.

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Matt Heinz is senior director of marketing for Verdiem, a company dedicated to reducing the carbon footprint of IT devices worldwide. He writes SLM's monthly column on green marketing.