“Ask your doctor if this hard-to-pronounce medication is right for you.” Sound familiar? It should. Over the last decade, it’s become difficult to watch an hour of television or read a magazine without running into a commercial for the latest cure for (insert disease here). For all of their ubiquity, the majority of ads are shockingly bereft of uniqueness. Bland, boring, and banal, they represent some of the worst of science creative in modern media. Here at ScriptPhD.com, we couldn’t think of a more appropriate category for the next installment of our ongoing advertising series “Selling Science Smartly.” Rather than expound on the plethora of bad pharmaceutical ads, we deconstruct a near-perfect Pfizer campaign out of Canada and interview the executive creative director behind the concept. Read our complete article under the “continue reading” cut.

Campaign: Pfizer “More Than Medication” (television, web)
Agency: Crispin Porter + Bogusky (formerly Zig Toronto)
Industry: Pharmaceuticals

1999 was a seminal year in the long history of direct-to-consumer marketing of drugs and pharmaceutical products. No, this was not the year that they debuted. In fact, the selling of chemicals and potions goes back to the early 1900s, when deceptive patient ads (snake oil remedies) made up to 50% of advertising revenue for newspapers. Significant changes didn’t occur until 1938, when Congress passed the Federal Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act that stipulated, among other things, that a drug had to be proven safe and effective before it could be marketed. In the early 1980s, when marketing of drugs spilled over from medical professionals to consumers, the FDA requested a brief moratorium on televised ads, which it lifted two years later, requiring only that the ads include a brief summary of the drug’s side effects, contraindications, warnings, and precautions, and provide “fair balance” between the drug’s risks and benefits (see terrific review). It wasn’t until 1999 that the FDA greatly loosened these requirements, only asking that advertisers provide information about side effects in the audiovisual presentation. The rest, as they say, is history.

The result of this deregulation of oversight has been an outright torrent of television and print ads over the last decade peddling panacea for everything from depression to restless legs. The table above shows the steady rise in overall spending on direct-to-consumer marketing since the FDA amendment. While the recent recession has somewhat tempered spending, the sector has not suffered to the degree that others have. And while it is true that ad agencies have to contend with much more stringent FDA guidelines for required content (such as warnings, side effects, and medicinal purpose) for drugs than for almost any other product—a unique, difficult creative obstacle—the fact is, pharmaceutical ads are many, and many aren’t good.

Remember that R.E.M. song “Shiny, Happy People?” It could be the anthem of the majority of pharmaceutical ads. You may not know what this medication is for, but it will make you smile as you run in slow motion through fields of sunflowers (assuming that you don’t have allergies; there’s a different commercial for that). Why not ask your doctor about it?? Take for example the egregious, bordering on offensive, 2001 print ad in the picture on the right for the HIV cocktail Zerit. A handsome, chiseled, smiling model in the foreground offers palliative assurance for a disease that scientists have found no cure for, while a group of background “patients” climb a symbolic mountain. The ad was roundly excoriated as the “Joe Camel of drug ads,” and even contributing to an epidemic of unsafe sex by making false promises and misleading impressions. (Actual side effects of HIV cocktail therapy can be so painful and debilitating that some patients refuse treatment.) According to an article in the trade magazine Advertising Age, just last year, the FDA admonished a group of 14 leading pharmaceutical companies for what it claims are misleading, misbranded ads on search engines such as Yahoo! and Google. Some wonder outright whether the proliferation of pharmaceutical marketing, now seen equally as a luxury for the healthy as a necessity for the sick, is having a deleterious effect on medicine.

It is within this cluttered field of profligate, if trite, advertising that an exceptional, authentic campaign out of Canada caught our eye. Geared towards encouraging personal health and wellness, the “More Than Medication” campaign for Pfizer by the Toronto office of ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky includes a series of well-produced, well-written television ads (mini-films, really) and a informative website. The storytelling within the two films, “Graffiti” and “Breathe,” is a particular highlight. We dare you to watch the first video, “Graffiti,” all the way through without crying.

Why it’s good science advertising:

The cleverness of CP+B’s “More Than Medication” campaign is 50% in the content that’s there, and 50% in the content that isn’t. Missing are the saccharine smiles, ridiculous athletic feats and idyllic dalliances of perfectly healthy people that never took the medication they’re purporting to be endorsing. Rather than portraying people who could be anyone (or, sadly, no one), these ads are the antithesis. “More Than Medication” is about life—mundane, radiant, lifechanging, heartbreaking. Through all of these milestones, Pfizer is attempting to build relationships one person at a time, and be a valuable presence in their healthy lives at their most important stages. Only time will tell if the campaign pays dividends, but as advertising strategy, it’s brilliant. Pharmaceutical companies rely on wholescale batch assembly at every stage of development, from searching for molecules as drug candidates, to researching them, to the mass production thereof. In fact, the fermentation tanks developed by Pfizer that enabled the first-ever mass production of penicillin during World War II became a national historic landmark in 2008. This doesn’t dictate that pharmaceutical ads must follow the same standard operating protocol.

Why it works:

Beyond “reinventing” pharmaceutical advertising, the “More Than Medication” campaign taps into an important (and growing) wellness zeitgeist being embraced by the professional and private health care sectors. Within the last few years, emphasis has shifted significantly from medication to meditation, pills to pilates, and technology to tofu. Individual preventitive care, including eating habits, exercise, healthfulness beyond chemicals, and individual responsibility, has been gaining momentum as a critical component of modern medicine, nowhere more than in how it is advertised. Kaiser Permanente’s enormously successful and popular “Thrive” campaign, recently expanded to the tune of $53 million, has echoes the welness call to arms of Canada’s “More Than Medication” spots. Internal documents indicate that the 2004 campaign was launched to combat a declining membership of 150,000 in a similarly reviled industry (health insurance). The initially modest reach has since expanded to print, outdoors, television and radio.

Pfizer supplemented their television spots with an interactive website that offers resources for individuals and their families, including eating better, strengthening mind and body, practical life tips, and places to find help to achieve these goals. In doing do, the pharmaceutical behemoth rebrands themselves as in touch, personally connected on an individual level and convey that they care about their patients’ health even if it means never having to take one of their medications.

What other science campaigns can learn from this one…

In Selling Science Smartly, don’t be afraid to be emotional. It seems like contradictory advice. Science and medicine are precise, technical and exacting, and needfully so. What they are not is antiseptic. Ask the medical doctor and nursing staff that spend days, weeks and months getting to know patients and integrated into their lives. Ask the patients and families who experience some of the most emotionally-charged moments of those lives (both joyous and sorrowful) in a hospital. Ask the scientist that slaves away at the bench in the hope that his or her efforts might save or improve lives. How do I know this last one? Because I was one of them. I did a large chunk of my PhD graduate thesis in a Novartis not-for-profit research institute doing drug discovery. My experiments led to a target candidate for acute myeloid leukemia (largely affecting young patients) which is currently being tested in mice. The exultation of a successful experiment and reward of hard work was far supplanted by pure elation at the thought that a life saved far in the future was because of my contribution. There is emotion in science and medicine; indeed, there can be no precision without passion. The role of a good creative is to extrapolate and harness it effectively. To all of my colleagues in labs and hospitals across the world and to all of the patients that their work ultimately affects, a campaign such as “More Than Medication” is a fitting tribute.

Questions for Aaron Starkman, Executive Creative Director—“More Than Medication” campaign for Pfizer

ScriptPhD.com: What was the client’s primary objective with this campaign and how did it lead to the development of the “More Than Medication” concept?

Aaron Starkman: The client wanted to create a bond of trust with consumers. Research showed that consumers don’t trust drug companies, and believe that they put profits before people. In Canada, we also have health care system issues with limited physician access and pressure on doctors to spend less time with patients. Canadians feel powerless when it comes to their health.

We knew that in order for Pfizer to build trust, we had to show Canadians that Pfizer’s point of view was different from other pharmaceutical companies; that, as a company, they believe that wellness is not achieved by taking pills, but about a more holistic, balanced approach that doesn’t require any of their drugs at all. “More Than Medication” was the freshest and clearest expression of our core idea. It takes a lot of people by surprise that a pharma company would take such a stance.

SPhD: Big pharma can be publicly perceived as a bottom line, profit-driven pill dispenser. Additionally, people’s eyes tend to glaze over when dealing with any scientific or medicinal concepts. How did these dual challenges figure in the ultimate mapping out of the “More Than Medication” campaign?

AS: We couldn’t let the work we did reinforce any of the negative perceptions of the pharma industry. We took the completely opposite tack to traditional pharma campaigns which typically focus on research and innovation and how that benefits people. Ultimately, those messages don’t resonate because they are company focused, not people focused. To break through, Pfizer had to shed all of the baggage and aim for a more insightful, emotional high ground which no other pharma company has done, even to this day.

SPhD: The “Be Brave” and “Breathe” videos for this campaign have a tremendously cinematical composition and emotional resonance, above and beyond the feel of a typical :30 or 1:00 ad. Can you speak to the creative development of these “mini-movies”?

AS: Internally, we refer to them as films. And that’s how our director John Mastromonaco treated them. John is a brilliant director and he’s really amazing at developing characters quickly. In “Be Brave” viewers go from feeling that the main character is a thug, to empathizing with him, to getting to know his family, to realizing he’s an amazing brother and a good person- that’s a lot. But John and his production company Untitled Films really believed in the project and the message Pfizer wanted to convey. And they were amazing partners throughout both projects.

SPhD: The ad campaign was launched in 2008. What has been the tangible impact to Pfizer and across Canada?

“More than medication” is more than a campaign – it’s a mantra that has positively impacted how Pfizer behaves as an organization. It’s been culture shifting for them. Externally, it has raised brand scores across a variety of metrics, trust being one of them.

SPhD: Biggest piece of advice for tackling an unorthodox campaign in a technical or dry field (in this case biotech/pharma)?

AS: Be brave.

SPhD: What’s a current ad campaign or creative concept that you really like and why?

AS: I love a non-traditional campaign from Sweden for Swedish Postal Service. They created their own celebrity called ‘Stefan the Swopper’. This guy became famous because he used social media to get out his message. And his message was that he wants to trade every single thing he owns – from his car right down to his toothbrush and boxer shorts. When people asked for details on how the swapping can work, Swedish Post’s service was revealed by Stefan. The campaign was an unbelievable success and a revolutionary way for a client to launch a service.

Take a look at this short video chronicling the clever ‘Stefan the Swopper’ viral campaign construction and its effects in marketing the Postal Service in Sweden:

ScriptPhD.com gratefully thanks Stephen Sapka and Aaron Starkman from Crispin, Porter + Bogusky for their time, coordination and enthusiasm for this project.

~*ScriptPhD*~

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Who among us has not computerized our bills, thinking that reducing paper consumption was more Earth-friendly? Or increased accomplishing anything and everything by email that used to be done by snail mail? On a larger scale, media and advertising (and to some degree entertainment) has had the same idea, moving away from traditional print to digital delivery models. At the Sustainable Media Climate Symposium in Manhattan last December, Don Carli spoke about the new and somewhat controversial concept of ‘Tree Washing’ within the advertising and media industries, specifically the notion that modern technology use and methodologies leave a larger carbon footprint than the traditional paper industry:

The video, and idea, caught ScriptPhD.com’s attention in a big way. Mr. Carli, the director of the Institute for Sustainable Communications, has hypothesized extensively about whether digital media is worse for the environment, including a recent white paper about the guilt that this new dilemma has incurred in consumers. Eager to learn more, ScriptPhD.com sat down with Mr. Carli to discuss the technology and environmental challenges presented by modern media and advertising conduits, how technologists and creatives can work in concert with environmental and watchdog organizations to mitigate these challenges as technology continues to evolve in our lives, and why it’s in businesses’ and brands’ best interests to compact carbon footprints. For our complete interview, please click “continue reading.”

ScriptPhD.com: We have talked before about your unusual background, which started off quite in the traditional artistic realm, before pursuing the more technical aspects of advertising and media deconstruction. Can you talk about that and how important it was to fuel your later passion?

Don Carli: I suppose you can say one thing leads to another, but it really has been a journey that began with an undergraduate degree as a liberal arts major. You learn to learn, you don’t learn anything in particular. As a liberal arts major at St. Lawrence University in Upstate New York, we were encouraged to study broadly and to double-major if we sought. So I started out as a biochemistry major, but found I enjoyed literature more than titrations, so I changed my major to English Literature, and at the time my roommate was (and still

is to this day) a sculptor, there undertaking a career in the fine arts. He’s a very successful man by the name of John Van Alstine. I was kind of interested in what he was doing, so I decided to double major, but I didn’t leave the chemistry behind. I’ve always been interested in, first of all, how we communicate as a species, and literature is one side of the brain and visual arts are the other side of the brain. Underlying it all, I was always interested in the science and the chemistry that makes it all possible. As an example, when I was studying art in printmaking, I wanted to understand what the pigments are made of, and when I was studying ceramics, I wanted to know what makes the glazes the colors that they are. I was the kind of art student that would walk over to the geology department and then do forensic analysis of the dyes and glazes and pigments. So I was always a left-brain/right-brain, quantitative/qualitative student of learning. In my studies, it was clear to me that the challenge that I’d face (and that we continue to face as a society) is reconciling these very different two cultures of the sciences and the arts. So a good deal of my career has been trying to resolve that conflict, trying to fuse those irreconcilable opposites into some synthesis that identifies or unlocks value.

SPhD: Let’s talk about that a bit. Before we get into the heart of some of the things you do with the Institute for Sustainable Communication, we need to define some loosely thrown around terms for folks that may have kept hearing them, but aren’t exactly sure what they mean. The first is greenwashing. We hear this term a lot, but very few people take the time to expound on it in-depth. Can you help us define what it is and why is it such a threat to advertisers’ creative content and the consumer?

DC: It’s related to the term whitewash, where you try to cover something over. Greenwashing is basically the practice of making environmental claims, or claims of being “environmentally friendly,” that don’t necessarily reflect the underlying reality. In effect, it’s deceptive use of green claims. Perhaps the best guide or articulation of what are called the “Seven Sins of Greenwashing” is a white paper that was developed by the environmental marketing agency TerraChoice. In Canada, TerraChoice also manages the Eco Logo program, the environmental labeling program that uses international standards for eco-labeling. In the “7 Sins of Greenwashing,” the sins are laid out—such as the sin of Hidden Tradeoff. That’s where you make some claim about a product without disclosing that there’s a hidden tradeoff, some dark side. Another [sin] is No Proof, where essentially you make a claim, but you don’t back it up. Or the sin of Vagueness, where the claim is so diffuse that you can’t really be held to any sort of criteria of judgement. And there are others that you could go on and on.

All of these things taken together undermine advertising and brands. At the end of the day, markets are dependent on trust by individuals of actors in the marketplace. So if Company A makes earnest efforts to quantify the environmental benefits delivered by its products or services, and to invest in the certification of those claims using sound scientific evidence, and then Company B simply makes a claim without substantiation, or a false or irrelevant claim, or tries to shift the burden from one area to another, that really diminishes the value of that other effort. So it’s very important that in markets, not only do we have rules, but that there’s enforcement of them so that we can trust that when something is said, it’s got meaning.

SPhD: That leads beautifully into my second point that I wanted to clarify with you, which is the notion of media supply chains. What are they?

DC: First of all, the Institute for Sustainable Communications is a non-profit that was founded a little over eight years ago. At the time, it was our realization that while there were many efforts being undertaken to use green marketing language and imagery, there was an almost wholesale avoidance or failure to recognize the environmental impacts of the media that were being used to carry out the messages. So, for us, a medium can be a magazine page, a newspaper, a billboard with LED lights, a web page, email and so on. Frankly, it could even be experiential media, like an event. But in every one of those cases, the medium involves flows of energy, flows of material, flows of waste, and patterns of human activity and information that have significant impacts. Unfortunately, most of those impacts are undocumented or unknown—they’re kind of the monolith hidden in plain sight. So the institute’s declared roles are to raise awareness of those media supply chains, and also to build capacity. They’re not just an environmental attack group. We work constructively with companies of all types, get them to understand that all of their communications media choices have environmental impacts, help them to quantify those, work with them, and help them to manage those impacts in a way that is good for business—not just less bad, but environmentally restorative.

SPhD: When you talk about media messages being “dissonant,” what do you mean by that?

DC: It kind of reminds me of even when you can’t sing, unless you’re totally tonedeaf, you generally can tell if someone is out of tune or off-key. And that grates us, it bothers us. From birth, we’re very conditioned to recognize dissonance between what people say and what they do. We have a highly evolved sensibility to identify politicians who say one thing and do another, parents who say one thing and do another, and yet, here comes the marketing industry that increasingly is using green messages. In many cases, they’re using genuine efforts to improve the formation of their products, the chemistry that they’re made of is greener, and to improve the environmental profile or sustainability of their packaging. To use less material, to use renewable and compostable material… and yet, characteristically, they tend to ignore the sustainability aspects of their advertising, their marketing/communications and their promotion activities. So consumers really aren’t stupid, and they can see, once they’re made aware of what the flows are, that there’s a disconnect. I think there’s an opportunity for brands to walk the talk, to demonstrate their commitments or their beliefs and values, not only in their products and packaging, but in their advertising and promotion, the way they employ people, energy, materials, and the way they manage waste.

SPhD: Technology and media aren’t going anywhere. If anything, they’re proliferating, especially now with the iPad’s successful launch. Social media is stronger than ever. You’ve talked a lot about the idea that just because something is digital or electronic, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s more green or tree-friendly. So, how do we piece together our growing need for consumption of e-media and the fact that it’s potentially devastating to the environment?

DC: You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and you can’t measure what you don’t identify. So you have to start by identifying where is the energy and material that makes it possible for me to advertise in any media coming from? The second question to ask is is that the most efficient use of energy or material—is it even necessary? Could I use less of it? And if I have to use it, is the energy renewable? If the answer to that is no, then we have to ponder whether there is a way to change the supply chain, the sequence of business activities that make it possible for me to do that, and still achieve my business objective. So we need to develop standards for product categories in advertising. We don’t have those today. We have standard units that are employed in banner advertising, but if you wanted to compare the carbon footprint of a banner ad to the carbon footprint of a magazine ad, the product descriptions don’t support those comparisons.

An example would be snail mail and email. We are extremely conditioned to believe that traditional mail is an annoyance, is bad, is environmentally impactful, and that email is better, or that digital communication is environmentally preferable. If you wanted to compare one dimension of physical mail and email, let’s say its carbon footprint, you have to have a unit of comparison. Today, the mailing industry describes a unit of mail as one gram of mail. How do you compare one gram of physical mail with its counterpart in email? There’s no weight. So as industries, first we need to develop product definitions or category definitions that allow us to make objective comparisons among and between different categories of communication. So a marketer, for example, can now create a media plan that uses 5 or 10 or 15 different media types to touch prospective and current customers with a message. And for each of those, to know how effective it was, what its economic costs were, as well as what its environmental and ancillary social impacts were. It’s not rocket science, it’s just accounting! But it’s accounting that we’re not doing today because, frankly, no one asked us to.

SPhD: What has been the response from the advertising and media industries to a lot of your efforts?

DC: We’ve been at it for about ten years. I’d say initially, I felt somewhat like a dog howling at the moon. Now it’s a little bit more like the dog that caught the car. There are advertisers and advertising associations that are listening and working with us now. Their change of heart and mind has really evolved as the recognition of sustainability performance or economic/social triple-bottom line performance has become more of a concern for regulators, with the SEC, particularly institutional investors, large retail chains like Wal-Mart, and to a lesser degree, to consumers. As those other interest groups have said that this idea of measuring the economic and environmental and social impacts of the business corellated with success and risk, we think it’s important to pay attention to it. An example of that from the last few weeks: Intel’s board acknowledged that sustainability performance reporting is a fiduciary responsibility. That’s a big deal. So once the reporting and identification/quantification is seen as a fiduciary responsibility, it changes the whole dynamic.

SPhD: As a consumer, what do we do?

DC: Well, the consumer ultimately holds the brand accountable. And we’ve seen study after study say that while consumers won’t pay more for a green brand, they will punish brands that they see to be irresponsible by not buying it. Even worse for the brand is that while a loyal consumer may tell one friend, a disaffected consumer will tell ten. So in this fishbowl world we live in, Facebook-Twitter-YouTube exposure, it’s kind of a synopticon. A brand can’t hide any longer—the activities of its supply chain, where its energy comes from, where its materials or labor come from. Sooner or later, someone with a cell phone camera will send an SMS and it’ll wind up on Twitter, and the next thing you know, it’s in the mainstream media news cycle within a day. And overnight, bilions of dollars in brand value can be destroyed.

When it comes to the media supply chain, it’s not that they have such egregious wrongs in them. It’s just that in aggregate, advertising and media supply chains represent about 10% of our gross domestic product. Advertisers in the United States spend on the order of $150 billion per year on paid media. That $150 billion is just to buy the space. That unleashes a whole cascade of business activities that involve mining, agriculture, forestry and transportation, retail, distribution that collectively represent about a trillion dollars or more of our GDP. So, there is no one company or brand that buys enough advertising to have concentration of influence. Even the biggest advertiser in the world spends on the order of $10 billion dollars out of $150 billion or more, so even if they were to lay down the law, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. There’s no functional equivalent to Wal-Mart in the world of advertising. If there was a concentration of 30-40% of ad buys in the hands of one company, there are so many different types of media and media supply chains, that there isn’t sufficient leverage in terms of impacting those different choices. So it is a challenge, but it’s not completely intractable. It begins by a recognition of a group of the largest brands that they need to quantify where the flows of energy and materials are, and to what degree they are at risk of changing that might hurt their business, the environment or society. Once they’ve gotten that picture, then it’s possible to change things.

Don Carli is a Senior Research Fellow with the nonprofit Institute for Sustainable Communication, where he is director of The Sustainable Advertising Partnership and oversees programs addressing advertising, marketing, corporate responsibility, sustainability, and enterprise communication. He is also a member of the board of advisors of the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design. If you have ideas for Don about what he discussed above, or want to learn more, follow him on Twitter @dcarli.

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Here at ScriptPhD.com, we pride ourselves on being different, and we like thinking outside the mold. So for Earth Day 2010, we wanted to give you an article and a perspective that you wouldn’t get anywhere else. There is no doubt that we were all bombarded today with messages to be greener, to use less, to be more eco-conscious, and to respect our Earth. But what is the underlying effect of advertising that collectively promotes The Green Brand? And has the Green Brand started to overshadow the very evil—environmental devastation—it was meant to fight to begin with? What impact does this have on the future of the Green movement and the advertising agencies and media that are its vocal advocates? These are questions we are interested in answering. So when we recently met Matthew Phillips, a Los Angeles-based writer, social media and branding expert, and the founder of a new urban microliving movement called Threshing, we were delighted to give him center stage for Earth Day to offer his insights. What results is an intelligent, esoteric and thoughtful article entitled “Plastic Beads and Sugar Water,” sure to make you re-evaluate everything you thought you knew about going green. We welcome you to contribute to (and continue) the lively conversation in the comments section.

“Access to land provides access to food, clothing, and shelter—which means access to land provides the possibility of self-sufficiency—if anyone wants to maintain a dependent (and therefore somewhat dependable) workforce, it’s crucial for you to sever their access to land. It’s also crucial that you destroy wild foodstocks: why would I buy salmon from the grocery store if I could catch my dinner from the river? Now, with people having been effectively denied access to free food, clothing, and shelter, which means having been effectively denied access to self-sufficiency, if they are going to eat, they’re gong to have to buy their food, which means they’re going to have to go to work to get the cash to buy what they need to survive. If you’re a corporation, you’ve got them where you want them.” —What We Leave Behind.

I have a great deal of admiration for our original permaculture engineers, the American Indians, all grass fed bison advocates. Looking back, we can’t imagine how naive or gullible they were to accept fire, water, plastic beads and useless trinkets in exchange for their healthy animals, fresh fruits and vegetables, consulting knowledge, and land—whose value is incalculable. Interestingly, here we are 518 years later, and we’ve all been duped into giving up our valuables for well marketed sugar water, and filtered tap… in plastic bottles.

After 1492 the American colonization effort was dominated by the European nations. In the 19th century alone, 50 million people left Europe for the Americas with ‘old world’ diseases, and a manifesto to massacre, obliterating 42 million American Indians. Everything changed; the landscape, population, plant and animal life. A few pioneers with rebel attitudes proved they could kill, conquer, and dominate an entire people and their land. What have we learned? When you deprive a group of people access to their land, you dominate and control their self-sufficiency, and ultimately their sustainability.

Earth Day was designed from its inception, April 22, 1970, to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth’s environment. Like all successful grassroots movements, Earth Day continues to self-organize and experiences annual growth. Over the years, it has propagated thousands of related causes or brands. This celebration gives us the opportunity to contemplate how to purchase food and drink that are produced locally through natural, sustainable methods. Whether we graze together, or barbecue grass-fed bison, I anticipate that many foodborne conversations will thresh organic ideas that seed new urban backyard businesses, and energize sustainable causes.

In fact, in this past year, we have witnessed local production and sustainable social causes grab the wheel from the generic “Green” brand. ‘Local and sustainable’ terms have the potential to drive significant impact in helping redefine a movement whose banding terminology is arguably out-of-focus. The Green goal has not achieved our Garden of Eden fantasy. Many generic Green causes have become distracted watching, and often joining, the fight against their ‘evil,’ instead of cultivating community and encouraging positive purposeful action. We’ve seen new Green causes sprout through PR dusting designed to crowd out similar already established causes. There’s nothing wrong with competition, seeking a bigger audience, news, press, and ultimately funding, but often the next new Green cause articulates greater Green evils in an attempt to further establish its reason to rally. This problem is churned up further with traditional reports broadcasting emotionally charged sound bites. Reporters often don’t take the effort to dig past the easy emotional approach, and into the rich cream of the cause itself. It is much easier to philosophize about the negative, which can feed our illusion of intellectual superiority, but it’s really keeping our callus-free hands from getting dirty planting GM-free maze in the garden and producing oxygen. “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves,” said Carl Jung.

A great brand seeks to unify in a cyclical system: Magnetizing believers, educating, generating action, and finally producing evangelists, who then magnetize new believers and so on. Memorable brands are most effective when they are communicating their power and concept through story. At its most basic, a brand’s story is made up of the hero, (relating to the brand’s reputation and hopefully positive recognition), and its evil, (the perception of what hinders recognition of the brand). Clarifying the adversaries of the brand can help to ‘rally the troops,’ codifying their cause and movement. Without an adversary, it’s often difficult to get enough of a rouse from fellow partners to get anything started.

Every great brand needs an evil to fight, but Green’s evil has metastasized into the most unimaginable catastrophe that no cause could ever compete against—an over heating planet. Since it doesn’t get much worse than a gooey globe due to our ongoing abuse, this heat enemy seemed guaranteed to become THE unifying force, an evil that we could all fight together to overcome. The problem is the scope is too large to control or confine. It has mutated. Proving global warming has the potential to fracture the green community, and along the way has produced a number of serious critics. Terms like ‘climategate,’ and climate skeptics like Doug Keenan, continue to look at research they say is embellished to promote climate change. Maybe worshiping the over heating demon has made the ‘Green’ brand seem boring compared to the excitement of the fight. Google never defined its “Don’t be Evil,” last minute tag, which is part of the reason it continues to generate conversations across the board. Google has essentially allowed all of us to insert our own definitions of evil, which in effect has unified greater numbers to their brand. A very novel approach.

If the evil of a brand consistently gains more press than the cause, then the evil assumes and replicates the identity of the brand. When this happens, the brand is no longer the host. When the evil forcefully sucks all the nourishment from the brand’s beating heart, then the evil we were fighting becomes the cause. We feel more comfortable with our fingers on the keyboard dealing intellectually with evil, which in effect, removes our foot from the shovel of physical, sweaty action. Do we want to get back to the heart of the brand, the original cause? Harley Davidson, once perceived as the brand of choice for rebels and tattooed ex-cons, re-branded itself and become the hog of choice for everyone who could scrape together enough money, regardless of prison experience, body type, tattoo placement, or gender. Even our kids wear official HD branded fashion with pride.

If we stop promoting the evils, real or manufactured, and start encouraging positive actions and solutions, (often positive action is the best offense against perceived evil anyway) we’ll find passionate people that want to join us in healing our people and planet. The strategic approach to refresh a brand is extremely important if it is to succeed. Digitally empowered consumers want to punish those that don’t behave in a socially responsible way and reward those that do. Social media has given people real power to act, and also to be negative. “Social media is inherently more negative than a positive medium on many levels,” said David Jones, the global chief executive of Havas Worldwide. “Lots of stuff that is passed around is negative. If you are a brand or a company today you should be far less worried about broadcast regulations than digitally empowered consumers.”

Many will continue to base their directive on creating new enemies, using ‘the fight’ to impassion those around them to rally their cause. Stop depleting the ozone layer, reduce your carbon footprint, global warming. All grand Green, but terminology that is technically fear-focused. We’ve heard the pitch: “It is your investment of $59.95 that allows us to partner together to fight this injustice.” The fear based, negative approach is almost always wrong, (unfortunately, it can be effective) . It’s a slippery slope, and those who don’t fully embrace the creed, are either stamped ‘stupid,’ or ostracized. But sustainability should be positive at its core. There is a time to debate, and we’ve debated ourselves into the greatest recession any of us have ever experienced. It’s time to stop debating.

Let’s begin by forming communities that build sustainable ventures together. If we are fighting, or politicking, we are not building. “We have become divided into so-called red and blue states, an outcome directly traceable to the urban-rural division of our society. This is something of a simplification, but food producers and their social allies tend to vote red and food consumers and their social allies tend to vote blue. The division is thought to be between conservative and liberal philosophies, but it much more reflects the difference between rural and urban values,” said Gene Logsdon.

There are two real challenges within the sustainability movement:

1) Consumers’ decisions (especially with food) are splintered by: A) Convenience, B) Tradition, C) Bias, and D) Beliefs.
2) Industry’s “manufactured demand” is affecting consumers with: A) Deceptive advertising, B) Ambiguous terminology, C) Perfectly designed plastic convenience packaging sealing our addictive lifestyles.

The minute we wake up we are subjected to an eco-plastic, part of this complete breakfast, 100% edible, industrialized high fructose corn syrup, brand campaign. Industrialized conveyor belts are pumping out a marketing product of starch coated with refined sugar. We can reignite our camaraderie by producing fruits, vegetables, animals and vehicles that not only compete, but surpass, our current available choices; all sponsored of course by our very green desire for sustainability. Incidentally, the average number of ‘green’ products per store almost doubled between 2007 and 2008. Green advertising almost tripled between 2006 and 2008. Does this necessarily mean we are heading in the right direction?

Governmental regulations for consumer protection in industrial food processing plants have only added to an already over stressed food system. This industrialized hyper-efficiency has caused diseases in animals and bugs on crops that have been taken so far out of their natural ecosystem that they can no longer produce without heavy use of antibiotics and pesticides. These measures, of course, were designed to keep us safe, but instead have become another major concern since “packaged nourishment” comes from the industrialized, often treated, food system.

Creatives are beginning to find and tell the stories concerning the overly subsidized and industrialized food and distribution system which favors use of pesticides and antibiotics. Since the government historically is not very good at spearheading movements, artists (media pioneers, authors) and social entrepreneurs will continue to fill this leadership role. We don’t have to look far to see powerful results. Thank the documentary filmmakers of Food Inc., Supersize Me, HomeGrown, The Future of Food, Story of Stuff, and Bottled Water, for helping us become visually aware of how industries have been deceiving consumers and themselves in their interest of greed and everyone’s desire for convenience. But there is hope, and it’s simple. Consumers are communicating online like never before, this leads to uniting together to strategically direct where we spend our hard earned bread and where we plant or raise our own food.

Jamie Oliver’s new TV series, The Food Revolution, has exposed the frozen fat underbelly of pre-packaged (brown and gold) foods, and government charts that officially dictate the clogging of our kids in school. Local and “real” food production and consumption has become a legitimate genre, with universities, and high schools requiring reading of titles like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, among others. These authors are helping us move past intellectual reasoning and into action. Since Timothy Ferrass taught us how to achieve a four hour work week, some of us among the fortunate now have the extra time to plant some seeds, water, and grow great big vegetables, and share them with our friends and neighbors.

I believe that in the next decade we will see less of an emphasis on extrinsic, materialistic values and more on intrinsic, spiritual values. This shift in emphasis will begin to bear fruit with the collaborative grafting between creative media pioneers and social entrepreneurs who seek to disrupt the status-quo. Research from San Francisco State University has shown that experiences bring people more happiness than material possessions. Experiences shared with others continue to provide even greater happiness through memories long after the event occurred. I believe many social entrepreneurs and creative media pioneers, in their hearts, believe their core purpose is to encourage our return to a sustainable world ecosystem. In other words, many will forgo Hummer-sized riches in order to nurture the successful adoption of their creations into society. There remains however ambiguity in the complexity that lies between the producer and the consumer. The ancient system of distribution gives middlemen the leverage to manipulate both producers and consumers. This too is evolving, as producers return to their roots and begin to distribute locally. There is change in the air, spring is coming.

We are at such a nascent stage in the evolution of the sustainable movement. The infrastructure necessary for the modern city to relocate to the farm is exorbitant, but the farm is beginning to integrate into the metropolis, one yard at a time. ‘Off the grid’ produces many wonderful connotations. It is an adventurous subject, one that I’m convinced will help propel this branding conversation forward. I wonder who else is discussing the connections of the ideas from this article, and from the authors and media pioneers mentioned? Who are the artisans, and social entrepreneurs that are working on this? Very curious about your thoughts. Please don’t hesitate to email me, and please act.

Let’s continue to find new ways to unify this brand with wonderful heart felt stories about the adventures of locally produced products, urban farms, and sustainability.

Writing this has given me a renewed appreciation for early American Indian cave drawn stories of food: adventure, and victory. There is more there than I had imagined.

Matthew Phillips is a media producer, writer and technologist working in Los Angeles, CA. He is the producer of Threshing.
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