Green Gone Wrong

The Right Idea, The Wrong Way. 

While working on a project for a SoCal environmental consultation and conservation company, I spent some time perusing Google for some inspiration. Scanning the hovering thumbnails of eco-advertisements, my search yielded more than just creative inspiration for my project; it illumined the greater good that exists in the advertising and marketing industries. But ten minutes in idle scroll I also realised that, while some advertisements hit home with a solid emotional blow, others missed the mark in very fundamental ways. Behind-the-curtain kind of ways. 

If You're Going To Ruin The Planet, You May As Well Try To Save It.

I'm definitely not the biggest fan of Coca~Cola, primarily because with all its benefits as a cheap and practical cleaning agent, you can bet it affects your body rather inversely. But before I get on a tangent about the seemingly endless negative effects of soda pop on the general population, let me laude this awesome billboard. As the copy says, it absorbs air pollutants. This, of course, is assuming that all those little, apparent trees are real. I love this billboard; the messages it sends is awesome. So awesome, I'm inclined to disregard its failure to offset the apparent damage caused to the environment in the smelting and welding process of all that metal scaffolding, the greenhouse gases released in manufacturing the composite used for the billboard's background material as well as the paint, and the electricity needed to brilliantly illume that (guesstimated) 100x100-foot positive message. Then, of course, there's the adverse health affects of soda products. Diet soda products, like Diet Coke and Coke Zero, for instance, contain microscopic shreds of paper to make you feel satiated; as well as the known carcinogens Aspartame and Phosphoric Acid (besides being a key ingredient in fertilizer, rust remover, and metal polish, phosphoric acid is an agent created in chemical plants from phosphorus from mines which would leave surrounding ecosystems, like those in North Florida, in a state of catastrophe in the event of an accident). Okay... this ad sucks.

Because Fu*king Mother Nature Isn't A Cliché Metaphor 

I get it – but why? I think SBE's shot at leveraging vulgarity as power may have missed its mark. Digitally, I have to give them props: quality wise, it's pretty well done. But, this is a case where the power of suggestion would have gone further, most notably because you don't see this ad being run publicly. An ad that's not advertised is really just a picture. Also, if you Google other ads in this campaign, they don't exactly make "Mother Nature" appear to be hating it. Good try, though, guys. Now go apologise to your mothers for tarnishing the image of graphic designers. 

If you're under the impression that eco-ads are trying a bit too hard to solicit support through illicit illustration, you'd be right. The caption on this one reads, "Few Giraffes Are Left. Only 1 in 3 survives outside of protected areas. Many of us want to change that." Though I get the foundation, Vida Silvestre, is depicting giraffes as getting desperate for survival, I feel like they should have shown this to a group of not-so-impassioned viewers. They'd have realized they forgot to factor the laugh factor.

Unsurprisingly, Comedy Central is here to capitalise on this poor judgement of these enviro groups and their ad agencies... "And for that, we thank you."

No Cigar, Boys.

This campaign, Tappening, was created by some PR dudes, and it's actually rather clever. That being said, it likewise misses the point, at least until you read the fine print. With all the awareness out there about the deleterious effects of bottles and other plastics on the environment, some initially infer this to actually be an anti-bottle campaign. But no, creators Mark Dimassimo and Eric Yaverbaum are taking aim at the bottled water industry. TapIt Water explains, 

Bottled water companies have a reputation for using deceptive advertising with labels showing mountain streams or pristine waterfalls, while the water inside is just filtered municipal water. Labels rarely indicate the water's source.

The problem is most people with a modicum of common sense know that bottling plants aren't advantageously located at the foot of pristine waterfalls. You can't count on much these days, especially when it comes to common sense, but this is pretty much a given. That fine print I was talking about reads, "If bottled water companies can lie, we can too." That's real mature. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to go tie up our justice system trying to finagle millions out of a mega corporation and stoke the ire of a denizen who'd get pissed off at a beautiful sunset if a poster told them to.

Winning.

For all the campaigns out there that fail, quite a few are fantastic. Green Peace is all across the board with theirs. Don't get me wrong, they've royally messed up in the past, arguably losing supporters with some of their campaigns. 

In the past, eco-ads featured captivating imagery of untouched landscape, majestic creatures of the wild or benevolent human interaction that made you want to take a hiking trip and just to save all your waste and be a sincere steward of the earth. Unfortunately, that practice isn't as affective anymore. We've become blasé to beauty, unless it's beauty we can by. And GreenPeace is anything but peaceful, often taking extreme measures to protect the environment. You know what? Go them. I won't pretend to condone each of their ads, but I do believe more aggressive approaches need to be made, especially when the battle for the environment means fighting consumerism. Talk about up hill both ways. This ad works. As does the World Wildlife Foundation's below. 

Subtlety is so cool.

But one thing can't be overlooked, even for the bad ads. And that's the fact that at least most of them are getting out there. The Coke one, for instance, was seen by many; many of whom didn't weren't so pedantically critical about it. Hopefully, it and all the others spark some sort of awareness. Even Tappening's campaign should inspire you to not take the word of major companies seriously, or at all. Green Peace made that point with its famous Shell hoax, Arctic Ready, probably the best ant-drilling campaigns ever. (You gotta play the game they made!) Think twice about over use. Think often about where you're products come from. You don't have to be a radical eco-activists to make a change; you don't even have to demand that companies change. Simply avoid their products and services in lieu of greener alternatives. The power of one, the effect of many. How's that for an ad?