It Grows On Trees

Audi: "Clean Diesel" Mops Up on Foreign Oil

What's most interesting in this online ad, part of a much larger, high-production-value campaign from Audi, is not the obvious heresy in positioning diesel, made cuter with an asterisk (and for which I give props to the creatives/planners who thought that up), as the friendlier fossil fuel, but the benefit it suggests: the chance to "send back" foreign oil.

Feels good, huh?  It's empowering, even a little bourgois, to "send back" something you don't care for or approve, in this case, that distasteful foreign oil, rolled onto our shores in beat-up oil drums.

 

Never mind that we don't actually send oil back. Ever. Never mind that the car that eliminates the need for foreign oil is itself foreign made. Audi let's you feel like you just stuck it to the man, all while cozying up to that sweetly reformed petroleum product.

There's power and in this case chicness in villifying the abstracted "other" hiding in the idea, if not the fact, of foreign oil (fact: most oil we import comes from Canada). It's less a "green" message than a national security/economic message, but the crossover is here to stay. It's just crazy to see foreign automobile makers shilling it — along with the subject of my next post, the Audi "TDI Movement."

Greenpeace Recycles JFK

And the result is both creepy and cliché.

Look, at this point, invoking the Apollo project and the civil rights movement of the 1960's to stir support for a green economic makeover has been thoroughly done.

We did it two years ago (pre-Astronaut*) when we rebranded the world's largest biofuel producer, Poet. The "We" campaign did it earlier this year. Thomas Friedman (2004) and Al Gore (2007) have each called for a new "Apollo program" to reverse global warming. And before any of us, the Apollo Alliance started it in 2004.

I like what Greenpeace has done in the past. And I'm a fan of AKQA, which produced this. But the CG repurposing of JFK's speech completely upstages the message. I wonder if by reanimating the departed hero, Greenpeace has really put a nail in the coffin of his inspiration.

Hat tip to adrants, which has apparently delighted in covering Greenpeace's advertising over the years.

* When we named our shop "Astronaut" in early 2007, it was to invoke the mojo of those "star travellers," not to link the green movement to the moonshot of '69. If that means anything.

Anyone Else Find This Awkward?

A call to arms from the newly radical energy incumbents in the "compressed natural gas" industry. Looks like, along with numerous election-cycle-ready campaigns like this this this and this, we can add CNG's scintillating new bromide to the 2008 energy-independence bandwagon.

Is it me, or is this one a little hard to jump out of your chair for? If you really think about it, the slogan, backed by the campaign's headline "Demand CNG Now," reads as shorthand for  "KICK FOSSIL FUEL WITH SOME OTHER FOSSIL FUEL."

Click the dial one more notch and you've pretty much got "Drill, Baby, Drill!"

"CNG Now" is almost as uncomfortable as Sarah Palin's claim that she said "thanks but not thanks to that bridge to nowhere." But in that way, maybe a push for natural gas is perfectly compatible with the double-speak of  presidential election politics, in which the Barnacles of the Beltway are suddenly the barracudas of "change."

Are we so cynical now that we believe up is down, war is peace, black is white and natural gas is green? More important, do the minds behind this slogan really think we're going to run yelling into the streets to demand more compressed natural gas?

These are questions the CNG campaign are going to have to ask, and fast. Right now, the slogan comes in dragging an albatross of "me-tooism," the lone accessory on a naked emperor. Energy independence is a worthy goal — one that deserves creative work that shift culture.

CNG may very well be a legitimate alternative fuel source. I can't say. What I do know is that this messaging strategy feels like an embarrassing call for STATUS QUO NOW. For a concept sure to run a long endurance race for media attention in clean energy, not exactly the best start out of the blocks.

Make Room for Mad Men

Be careful what you wish for, eco-warriors. You just might have to make peace with the enemy.

When Live Earth launched in July, it was obvious the green movement in general and green business in particular would have to get comfortable letting some unlikely guests take a seat at the table — juggernauts like Chevy, GM and Big Oil who helped get us in the mess in the first place. So no one should be surprised, then, to see their ad agencies trailing along, too.

Comes now the inevitable stampede of mainstream, old-guard ad agencies like Grey NY with a green self-promotion called Green It Forward.  Is this a laudable act of leadership or a cynical case of me-tooism? You be the judge.

Just last week as I was excited and bewildered to discover an avalanche of green marketing conferences coming up this fall, with some big names attached: Sustainable Brands 07, whose sponsors include BP and Wal-Mart; Target Green, sponsored by PRWeek with contributions from GM, Procter & Gamble and Canon; and Good and Green, featuring a posse of green marketers with serious street cred, including a guy who is as enthused as me, if not more, by the rush of marketers into this space.

To the extent the big agencies are masters of persuasion, this is great news. Some of the most interesting, breathtaking work is and will keep coming from these guys. We need great thinking and top-shelf creative work to move the green needle in the market. Hell, that's very premise of my shop. But these are the same who inspired the term "greenwashing" with the veneer they've slapped on the giants of industry.

Alas, the Grey campaign, though perhaps well intentioned, smacks of a self-promotional greenwash. It makes me wonder: how far before we reach the point of over-saturation with this stuff? How well will Grey really "green it forward?" Maybe we can be cautiously optimistic. By this time next year, when Sustainable Brands 08 kicks off, I'll bet we'll have our answers. Hat tip to adfreak

 

You're Joking, Right?

Talk about the height (or low) of me-tooism.
But then, what do you expect? If you're on the Hummer account, what choice do you have in a market that's making you the whipping boy of climate change? Don't you sort of have to grasp for whatever straw you can — and push 20 mph on the highway as miserly gas consumption? I feel for these guys, I really do: it's like a friend once said of parking meter readers; "Why would you want a job where everyone hates you?"

I suppose if you're in the auto industry, you do the best you can playing catch-up with a world view on energy that's quickly overtaking you . Thus the above shill, along with GM's other worthy effort but dubious play at eco-credibility.

Plastic to Save the Environment

It's quite a metaphor: living for today and paying for it tomorrow.

GE is literally banking that Americans' infamous "I'll worry about it later" behavior, which got us into this mess in the first place, will clean up the Earth. For every dollar you borrow with its new rewards credit card, GE will donate a penny to carbon offset programs

Nathan Schock has a great post about it on his Greenway Communiqué. I'm a believer in incremental steps  (there's no silver bullet) to turn around global warming and other concerns, but this one has a bit of a stink to it. It seems a perversion of the idea people "vote" with their wallets; but perhaps when it comes to economics and human behavior, the scientists were right: plastic stays in the environment forever.