The phrase and the concept -- there is good money to be made in preserving the environment -- is so often repeated that it has become a cliche.
So it was probably inevitable that some enterprising advertising agency would figure that there is equally good money to be made from specializing in ads that promote greenness.
And, in fact, agencies with a green specialty are sprouting like alfalfa.
"When I started out in 2003 there were maybe five or six green agencies around," said John Rooks, president of Dwell Creative, a three-person environmental ad agency in Portland, Maine.
"There's got to be at least 50 of us now," he said.
There are no definitive numbers to prove his point. Neither the American Association of Advertising Agencies nor AAR Partners, which helps clients find agencies, have kept count. But anecdotal evidence is mounting.
"The nonprofits are realizing that it takes money to create a brand, and the corporations are finally getting that their customers really care about green," said Hugh Hough, who founded the advertising agency Green Team in New York 12 years ago.
Nonprofit environmental organizations, many of which rely heavily on pro bono work filtered through the Advertising Council, say they are increasingly hiring small ad firms for special projects. Corporations say the green newcomers are knocking on their doors, too.
"I keep hearing about smaller shops landing with bigger clients, so I'm not surprised that green agencies are getting in the door," said Lisa Colantuono, a managing partner of AAR Partners.
"Clients are attracted to the flexibility and lack of bureaucracy in a small shop, and experience with environmental issues would certainly be a plus," Colantuono said.
The big advertising agencies are not about to cede the territory, of course. Researchers at the agency association logged 42 requests for information about the environment from member agencies this year -- last year they received only eight.
"I'll bet a lot of people are using the information to pitch new business," said Kipp Cheng, an association spokesman.
Nor are the newcomers carving much away from long-standing agency relationships.
Several small agencies tried to get a slice of General Electric's Ecomagination campaign, which is handled by BBDO. Judy Hu, global executive director for advertising and branding, would not even grant them interviews.
"BBDO has been our agency for 80 years, and they fully understand how our products and services fit in with our commitment to do proactive things in the world," Hu said.
"And our efforts are global, so we need the resources of a large-scale global agency," she said.
But smaller companies -- particularly those that want to grow -- are happy to give the new agencies a chance.
White Lotus Home, which makes chemical-free mattresses and furniture, often from waste fiber that might have ended up in landfills, is looking to expand its distribution. Marlon Pando, its president, got a postcard from Dwell Creative, admonishing companies not to be "greenwashers" (companies that promote themselves as more earth-friendly than they really are) -- and showing Rooks with a bar of green soap in his mouth.
Pando was tickled by the cheekiness, and hired Dwell to run a public relations and ad campaign.
"We are more than salespeople," Pando said.
"We are educators on the environment. And we want to work with ad people who think like we do," he said.
A visceral understanding of environmental issues may be the biggest selling point the new agencies have.
"These new small firms seem to have a more sophisticated sense of the role groups like ours must play in embarrassing companies or in inspiring their customers to do so," Michael Brune, executive director of Rainforest Action Network, said.
Leaders of agencies in the green niche say that is because they care as much about the mission as the money.
"We want our advertising to inspire true change," said Rooks, who said Dwell had rejected assignments that smacked of greenwashing.
Big Think Studios, a two-year-old San Francisco firm, goes a step further -- it works only for nonprofits and foundations, including those that champion social causes as well as the environment.
"We want to help them make ads that look as professional as the ones they sit next to in the paper," said Peter Walbridge, its creative director. Big Think is not making big profits, "but we do bill maybe US$2 million to US$3 million a year, and we do make money," he said.
Big Think, of course, has formidable competition in that nonprofits can get a lot of their advertising free through the Advertising Council. Even so, many of the larger environmental groups are carving out some of their budgets for the specialists.
Environmental Defense, for example, has done most of its advertising through the Advertising Council for the last 18 years, and Fred Krupp, the group's president, is delighted with the results. He particularly loves one recent commercial, created pro bono by Ogilvy, in which a speeding locomotive bears down on a middle-aged man who claims that the impact of global warming is probably 30 years away.
"That won't affect me," the man says. As the train is about to hit him, he steps away, to show a somber child standing behind him in its path. The tagline -- "Go to www.fightglobalwarming.com while there's still time."
Krupp says the ad generated great traffic for the global warming Web site. Still, he is using Green Team to promote www.undoit.org, a Web site aimed at influencing environmental legislation.
"They know the turf when it comes to climate change, and it just seems cleaner to keep the paid and voluntary work separate," he said.
"You're going to see nonprofits move more and more to the Web," said Norman Dean, executive director of Friends of the Earth, which is already entertaining pitches from several specialized agencies.
"And we'll all probably be paying for help in the transition," he said.
Perhaps paradoxically, while the small agencies seem most earnest about the green cause, many of them are using a light touch in their ads. Dwell, for example, recently created a print campaign for a recycling program in Maine that showed a tattooed tough ("Bikers recycle"), a nerdy type with patched eyeglasses ("Geeks recycle") and a curmudgeon ("Fuddy duddies recycle").
Even some environmentalists say that a light touch may work better.
The Pew Center on Global Climate Change, for example, stopped advertising a few years ago "because it was too expensive and had no clear returns," said Eileen Claussen, its president.
"Most of the advertising I see about climate is just too alarmist, and too light on solutions," she said.
"People know about environmental problems, so we want to sell optimism," said Don Schneider, executive creative director for BBDO.
"People want to hear a big, incredibly competent company saying, `We have a solution to this problem that is eating away at you,'" he said.
Maybe the big agencies know a bit about specialization after all.
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