'Green' marketing loses buzz and credibility

By Eric Pfanner
Published: July 6, 2008

PARIS: At an annual gathering of the advertising industry a year ago in Cannes, the environment was the topic du jour. "Be seen, be green," one agency urged on the invitation to its party at a hillside villa. Al Gore, invited by another agency, flew in to deliver a message linked to "An Inconvenient Truth," his film about climate change: that the ad industry could play an influential role in encouraging business and consumers to change their ways and slow the process of global warming.
The sun was still beating down on the Côte d'Azur last month as advertising executives from all over the world returned for this year's festival. But Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, was nowhere to be found, and the party buzz was about the U.S. presidential elections, the Euro 2008 soccer tournament or even the business of advertising itself. "Green" marketing, while booming, had lost some of its buzz.
The advertising industry is quicker than most to pick up on changing consumer tastes and moods, and experts say many people are growing skeptical about the proliferation of ads with an environmental message.
Over the past year, as if in answer to Gore's plea, marketers around the world have jumped onto the green bandwagon.
But the sheer volume of environmental advertising and the flimsiness of the claims in some of the campaigns show signs of generating an unintended effect. Instead of serving as a call to action or casting brands in a positive light, these ads are generating an increasingly skeptical response.

"After 18 months, levels of concern on any issue tend to drop off," said Jonathan Banks, business insight director at Nielsen, the market research company, in Britain. "I fear that something similar may happen with this."
With everyone - from oil companies to dishwasher makers to banks - promoting environmental credentials, consumers have been deluged in green-linked advertising and consumer complaints have risen.
The Advertising Standards Authority, an industry-financed organization that monitors the contents of advertising in Britain, said it had received 561 complaints from consumers about environmental claims made in 410 ads last year. That was up from 117 complaints in 83 ads only a year earlier.
The European Advertising Standards Alliance, an umbrella group for similar organizations across Europe, said it had seen sizable increases in complaints in other countries, including Belgium and the Netherlands, particularly involving automotive advertising.
Watchdog organizations like these say they are struggling to deal with the increased numbers both of ads and complaints. The British standards authority has guidelines for environmental ads, stating that they must not be misleading, but Matthew Wilson, a spokesman, said the agency was sometimes finding these rules insufficient to deal with the growing volume and complexity of environmental advertising.
The authority last month held a seminar on the issue, inviting marketers, ad agencies and environmental groups to discuss ways to update the guidelines.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission, which monitors the contents of advertising, has begun a similar process, holding hearings and workshops on possible changes to its codes relating to green marketing.
Some countries have already gone further. In France, for instance, politicians, environmental groups and industry leaders at a summit meeting last autumn agreed to take steps to ensure the responsibility of green-themed advertising. Following the meeting, a special panel was established to review such ads.
As regulators work out their response, bloggers and other Internet critics have already started to expose what they see as "greenwash" advertising.
A French group called l'Alliance Pour la Planète, for example, cites an ad for a Japanese-made sport utility vehicle that billed it as having been "conceived and developed in the homeland of the Kyoto accords," the international emissions-reduction agreement.
Some ad executives in France are concerned that their industry seems to be bearing a disproportionate amount of blame as environmental groups seek to raise awareness about climate change.
Jean-Pierre Séguret, chief executive of the French arm of the advertising agency DDB, said that many young employees in France were leaving the ad business to go to work for nongovernmental organizations, including green campaign groups.
To try to improve the image of advertising, agencies like DDB are creating sustainable development programs, moving to make their own businesses more environmentally friendly.
"We're not working on this because it's trendy," he said. "We want to implement a real strategy."
Agencies are also trying to work their way around consumer skepticism as they devise strategies for clients.
Mike Lawrence, executive vice president of corporate responsibility at Cone, a brand strategy agency in Boston, said some consumer concerns may stem from the way in which many green-themed ads are done, rather than any objection to associating brands with an environmental message.
"There's a gap between what the marketers are doing and what the consumers are receiving," he said. "The marketers may not realize the gap is there, and that's a dangerous thing."
The problem, he said, occurs when marketers make exaggerated claims about a product's attributes, which may be fine when selling toothpaste or vacations. Most people probably know that the toothpaste won't actually make their teeth sparkle or help them get the girl, but they play along with the joke.
But when an advertiser says its product will actually "improve the environment," or some variation on that theme, savvy consumers recoil, Lawrence said, knowing that, in all likelihood, what is actually meant is that the product is only less bad for the environment than it could be, or than competing goods.
"This can really backfire with environmental advertising," Lawrence said.
To try to avoid this problem, agencies are advising marketers to back away from vague, unsubstantiated claims, the kind that bloggers and other critics are quick to spot.
Instead, they are urging advertisers to make sure their environmental messages are highly specific, pointing to specific steps that a company has taken to improve its record or to get consumers to take small but concrete action that can help reduce carbon emissions. Increasingly, such ads also feature a link to a Web site for viewers to read more.
For example, Procter & Gamble, which makes laundry detergent, has been running an ad campaign in Britain in which it urges consumers to wash clothing at 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), rather than higher temperatures, as a way to use less energy. Similarly, Reckitt Benckiser has been advertising what it says are the environmental benefits of washing dishes in a machine, rather than by hand; this consumes less water and energy, the company says.
Skeptics, however, might note that Reckitt makes dishwashing detergent for machines, but not for washing dishes by hand.
Arlene Fairfield, senior vice president at the DDB Brand Integrity Group in Seattle, said advertisers were increasingly worried about looking inconsistent if sweeping green claims were followed by a corporate crisis - even one not directly related to the environment.
"They want to make sure there aren't going to be any skeletons in the closet," she said. "Or if there are, they want to be prepared."
BP, one of the first big companies to give itself a green makeover, has recently scaled back its image-building activities, after an explosion at a refinery in Texas in 2005 killed 15 people. The explosion was unrelated to environmental issues, but made claims of good citizenship seem hollow.
The Brand Integrity Group works with companies on how to avoid inconsistencies, helping them devise internal as well as external environmental policies and communications strategies. Amid the growth in green marketing, business for such agencies has been booming. Big ad agency companies are creating specialist units to work on environmental campaigns, and green-focused start-up agencies are proliferating, too.
All of them face a challenge long confronted by marketers dealing with more mundane matters, like how to move the merchandise.
"We're going to get to a point where green is ubiquitous and you have to do something pretty different to distinguish yourself," Fairfield said.
For some consumers, advertisers and regulators, it seems, that point has already been reached.