Media turns green

Green stories now run in all sections of the New York Times and the Washington Post and other major dailies each day, and are featured on the covers of Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Wired, and the Sunday New York Times Magazine, among many others. Big-budget ad campaigns such as those for Apple’s “Greenest Laptops,” Kashi cereals’ “Seven Whole Grains on a Mission,” and Scott Naturals’ “Green Done Right” run on primetime television. Discovery Channel, Planet Green, Sundance, and other eco-cable channels target the sustainability-aware viewer. At NBC, attention is paid to green via the special programming and “Green is Universal” campaign. With nearly five million subscribers, Good Housekeeping magazine has even introduced its own green seal accompaniment to its venerable Good Housekeeping seal. Such organizations are not only committed to addressing the green interests of their viewers and readers, they are greening themselves, some through the Open Media and Information Companies (Open MIC) initiative dedicated to making corporate management practices of the media industry more transparent and responsible.

Many of the uncountable daily messages and images that fan the mainstream consumer’s green lifestyle are supported behind the scenes by the Environmental Media Association (EMA), a Hollywood-based nonprofit group with the goal of securing primetime television and movie exposure for the environment. Helping EMA to paint green as cool, accessible, and something people want to emulate, are many Hollywood celebrities including Bette Midler, Brad Pitt, Julia Louis Dreyfus, Cameron Diaz, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the father of Hollywood green, Ed Begley Jr., who among other celebrities walked the green carpet from his Toyota Prius into the Academy Awards in 2006.

Meanwhile the Internet is fast changing the media landscape, becoming the interactive medium for information-seeking aware consumers. Websites such as Discovery’s treehugger.com and greenamerica.org empower visitors with the latest new green products and green living tips. Do an Internet search of the words, “green,” “environment,” or “eco” and you will find that entire communities of tweeters and bloggers are passing along trusted recommendations about which products to buy and which companies to trust. Is your sustainable brand part of this digital conversation? (See the Further Information section on page 199 for the names of more consumer-focused websites and media.) Finally, according to J.D. Power & Associates, conversations on sustainability-related blog posts and discussion boards more than doubled between January 2007 and December 2008. By the end of 2008, more than 70% of online contributors indicated that they were concerned about the environment and nearly half reported that they were actively doing something about it: e.g., driving less, recycling – and buying green products.