Early in my career I worked at a small boutique agency in Sydney called McCorkell & Associates. At the time we specialised in marketing communications for the ICT industry and during the late 90s it was a booming business. Every year there was something new. A piece of software that would revolutionise the way we would work. A piece of hardware that was larger in capacity, but smaller in size and more secure than all the rest. One year there was Y2K – that crafty date bug that was going to lead to Armageddon!
This was the agency where I learnt many things about my trade. It was also the place where I first begun to question how genuine a trend was, or if it simply just hype. To this day, I still don’t know how much of a problem Y2K was. It certainly did not lead to a world meltdown. Was it a job well done or just a whole lot of hot air? I don’t know.
Every now and then I find a subject on which I struggle to form an opinion. It’s not that I am being impartial; it is simply that I just don’t see any evidence that helps me form an opinion one way or another. Today, I feel that being green in marketing leaves me in that same no man’s land of opinion.
In 2007/2008, I was working with a number of different clients on how to make their events and exhibitions greener. Virtual events were being touted as the ‘green way forward’. Being green often meant being more expensive, but many clients were willing to pay more to be green back then.
A personal observation – then the Global Financial Crisis hit and everything went quiet! Cost became the primary decision maker.
I appreciate that at the time it was a matter of survival. Discretionary spend is the first thing that gets cut. However, it is now 3 years on and I am still not seeing any signs of sustainability practices in marketing becoming mainstream.
This is not to say that being green in marketing has not continued. It is simply an observation based on of lack of observations. I see huge efforts by brands to make the manufacturing of products greener and more sustainable. Is it just that these stories are taking center stage?
What does inspire me is the effect when government legislates or mandates sustainability practices. For those brands sponsoring the London Olympics, they and their agency partners are being challenged in ways like never before. Through the creation of a necessity to be sustainable, new approaches, techniques and materials are being explored. I just hope that these don’t stop at the end of the games, but continued to be applied elsewhere.
Event and exhibitions must be one of the least green out of all types of marketing tactics. When phrases such as build and burn are commonly used by clients to describe exhibition stand builds in Asia you know that there is a lot of room for improvement. However, I fail to believe that there could not be progress in this industry or in marketing as a whole within the region.
I do fear that we may have gone backwards in the last few years. Perhaps, it is that we lost the momentum created by government policy, corporate desire and consumer demand all being aligned and united by the global warming debate. However, I am not sure if we actually have.
I have no opinion, but would like one.
