As is the way in agencyland, there comes a time to move on and my time is done here. I have actually now left the agency to seek out new challenges. From the beginning I designed the project to continue without me and have drafted a proposal to pass on to some deputies (who have been appointed by management – a minor victory in itself.)

Below is a version of this hand-over document (some things have been changed to protect the anonymity of my agency). As I hope you have gathered throughout this project, this is merely my attempt at making a difference and as such this proposal is something that best fits this particular agency. There are many different types of agency out there in adland. Yours will differ and as such some of the suggestions will not be relevant or not fit your processes

If you can make any difference at all it is a victory. Be proud of yourself for getting the ball rolling. As some wise old dude once said: “The longest journey starts with the first step”.

If you have any questions at all about overcoming eco obstacles and challenges at your place of work, please ask in the comments below, everyone will benefit from it (me included.)

Fail. It’s one of those words that gets bandied about quite a bit these days, especially on the interwebs, somewhat of an ubermeme (if such a thing exists!)

There are those who celebrate fail with Failblog.org  This site is the source of schadenfreude for many a “Friday Funny” email with pictures of hapless individuals falling off bicycles and countless other misfortunes.

(I do like it’s counterbalance site, Succeedblog.org  if you haven’t seen it, it’s a nice way to pass a lunchbreak.)

And of course there is the heavy use of Fail on Twitter – the FailWhale, (Twitter’s error message) hashtags such as #fail, #BPfail,  #vodafail, basically just insert the person/company/organisation of your choosing and suffix it with fail.

In short, we use it as dismissive shorthand for something that does not live up to our expectations and especially juicy if that entity happens to have set up those expectations itself as did BP with it’s bullshit Beyond Petroleum positioning.

The other day I spotted something that seeks to embrace the somewhat old-world meaning of failure.

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve seen enough quotes about failure to last you a lifetime thanks to various professional twitter accounts trying to pad out their autotweets about getting rich using Twitter. However someone has taken the notion of ‘fail to succeed’ and turned it into something beautiful.

http://www.admittingfailure.com is a site set up by NGO, Engineers Without Boarders Canada. They’ve built this site so that they and other NGOs like them can learn from their mistakes.

I think it’s a really cool idea. Whilst it is early days and failures are somewhat limited, they hope other NGOs will have the humility to contribute their failures and built the resource. Everybody will benefit. Nice, huh?

My question to you is: How does your agency deal with its failures?

Does it shuffle the account team or sack someone? If there is a session to discuss what went wrong, what happens to those notes and learnings? As Tony Abbott unfortunately expressed over in Afghanistan some months back, whilst empathising with a group of combatants, “Shit happens.” The point is though, what are you going to learn from the shit that happened?

I’m not saying put your failures up on a blog or publish them I’m just saying use them as an investment in later success.

As agencies come under increasing pressure to show ROI for clients, maybe this is one way to help your internal processes along the right path.

After all, as Leo F. Buscaglia said: “Success often lies just the other side of failure”

A really bold thing to do would be to show your clients and earn their trust but you’d have to have pretty big cojones to do that, right? 

As I have been auditing for a month I have decided to go public with the first of my findings to use them as a way of opening up discussion about our workplace and our environmental impacts.

My first undertaking was to audit our Recently Printed pile from the print room. I chose this area as it is one of the most visible signs of waste and inefficiency (to me) because this printed material goes from the printer, into the ‘Recently Printed’ pile and after some delay goes into the recycling bin without serving any useful purpose.

In other words it is completely wasted resource.

We pay a ‘click-charge’ for the main printer (a rental arrangement which includes toner but not paper) and the other printer is a black and white inkjet which we pay for ink and paper but has no click charge as we own it.

As you may recall from week one, I had covertly asked our studio manager, Trev to help me. Part of his brief was to keep an eye on the Recently Printed pile and at the end of each week to deliver it to me in a bundle.

After four weeks of these piles being delivered to me I have taken this 5cm high stack and counted the various colour, black and white and A4 /A3 sheets. (A rather painful task but when it’s for a good cause, the motivation is easy enough to maintain.)

RESULTS:

After tallying up the figures, I multiply by the number of weeks we are in operation then removed another week to allow for each member of staff being either sick or on leave (5 days X 28 people). Trev advised me that the weeks we audited were leaner printing weeks than usual so the results are rather conservative.

So here are the results based on a 49 week year:

A3 : 176: click charge = $25.72

A4 colour: 2964 click charge = $430.89

A4 B+W: 857 (no click charge)

A4 Orphans (just signatures or footers printed on page): 308

I know this is a small amount of money to most but bare in mind this doesn’t include the cost of the paper nor the ink carts for the B+W, the cost of delivery of the paper or recycling cost.  Also this is just the printing that gets left behind. Of all of the stuff I collected much of it was emails from clients. (That’s also where you get the orphan pages, it seems no one is previewing the job before sending to the printer. No one is using “fit to page”.

Armed with the results I sent an email to all staff including the boss announcing the project and with the results presented as an interesting “did you know…?” sort of thing so as to not make anyone feel they were directly being targeted. I also asked for everyone to suggest other areas where they thought the company could improve.

I got about a 35% response rate with only one reply being a non-constructive joke. Considering how many jokers there are in any given agency (ours is full of them) I took to it to be a rather positive start.

Suggestions included:

·      A non-boarding of concepts policy (that foam-core is pretty unfriendly stuff)

·      Printing double-sided whenever possible

·      Recycling of plastic and glass

·      Use recycled paper in the printer

All great ideas. My aim was to try and share the ownership of the project and try and get everyone involved. I figure the last thing anyone wants is some rabid greenie telling them what to do. The hardline greenies of the past have -whilst fighting important battles - have done nearly as much harm as they have good and alienated as many as they have recruited on their way to saving the world.

I want this project to be fun and I want to project to succeed - inclusiveness rather than pointing the finger - is what is called for at every step of the way.

At no stage can this be anything other than a positive voyage of environmental self-discovery. If employees don’t make it there on their own, just leave them be. Any attempts to drag them along for the ride will most likely turn them against you and the project in hand. Let the others who believe in the project (remember the allies I suggested recruiting in week one) fight those battles for you. 

It’s pretty satisfying when you’ve been banging on about something all voice-in-the-wilderness-like and then the boss says:

“Hey you’ll like this. We’re filling-in an RFT (Request For Tender) for XYZ (largeish FMCG brand) and everything you’ve been on about - is what they’re asking for.”

He was right. Vindication is a great feeling.

I’ve mentioned large brands and companies like Nestle getting raked over the coals by Greenpeace for their unethical palm oil source connection used in their Kit Kats and I think that has resonated through Australian FMCG land. About time. As I anticipated, big companies are looking inwards and upstream as a result of the Kit Kat debacle.

Whether these big FMCG companies are paying mere lip service or are serious about their environmental audits, I believe it’s time for all agencies to take a long hard look at themselves.

If you’re yet to face a request to respond to a potential client’s environmental concerns, get ready. It’s just around the corner. For that matter, it might be a client you’ve been working with for years.

And then, when the carbon economy hits full-stride you are going to be hit with a governmental auditor whose job it is to make sure companies like yours walk what they talk (at the bequest of big brands and potential clients.)

So, in the meantime, you have a choice. Prepare and develop an eco-advantage –‘catch the wave’ - or sit there and do nothing proactive and be lying on the beach working on your tan - when the wave crashes. 

Use this blog. Learn as we learn. So far I’ve highlighted many areas where my boss can save thousands. I wonder if he understands the effect on employee morale all this stuff can have as well as those future employees who actually care about where they work and how their potential place of work conducts itself in the community. When you give people a chance to do the right thing – to do good, they usually choose do it. 

Oh dear. Our paper recycling company rep has just cracked it! (Someone at work is putting plastic and polystyrene in the paper recycling bin.)

It appears I have my work cut out for me and will need educate my co-workers on what can be recycled and what can’t!

Few recycling companies will tolerate incorrect waste in bins as it contaminates the load and it either means sorting everything by hand or rejecting the whole batch if a contaminant enters the process.

In the meantime I think I had better make some signs for the recycling bin!

Our accounts guy has come back to me on a few things.

Each year we spend $3000 on filtered water, $260 on the chiller/dispensers and about $30 on delivery. This does not take into account the fuel burned to deliver it nor does it take into account the rental on the space that the stack of barrels takes up in the rather small kitchen (.6875m2), the space in the office for the 2 dispensers (.2500m2 each) and the power used to run the dispensers cooling and heating functions.

He has also advised on the money spent on printer cartridges. (As it turns out they were all going straight into landfill.) I asked our studio manager to estimate how many printer cartridges we use in a year for our main colour printer plus the B+W inkjet.

I’ve worked out we were sending over 50 printer carts to landfill each year.

I think keeping things simple to start with is a key thing.

Instead of sending the few carts that are refillable to a refilling company, I think we need to instill the waste systems thinking process first. Once everyone’s thinking like that we can fine tune as we go.

As most of these carts are non refillable, I have now asked our studio manager to give them to our lovely receptionist to take with her to the Post Office to place in the printer cart recycling bins they have there. This will eventually allow the partners to renegotiate with our cleaner who charges over $1800 in waste disposal as he will be disposing of much less waste by volume and weight each year.

These are exciting times. At least to me they are. Why? Because the thing that I have felt a little uncomfortable with in my chosen field of marketing, the elephant in the room, TRUTH is now very much coming into big brand communication. This isn’t to say that there’s just been lies up till now. No, far from it. An excellent article in AdAge last week, The Competitive Advantage of Truth has finally tipped me over to writing about this ‘new’ consumer movement, the Conscious Consumer.

We are now watching a rise in communication of ‘transparency’ from brands as well as the awakening of corporate citizenship - whether it is communicated in terms of a general corporate policy or by a cause/purpose push. Whilst this has been well underway for many years in the States and the UK, it is really only in the last few years that it has begun to take proper hold here in Australia.

I propose the following reasons for this: 

1.    Environment into sustainability

2.     GFC

3.     Social media and media savvy 

The Environment:

Whether you believe we as humans are affecting the climate or not (sorry skeptics – I do, just so you know) there is a growing tide of consumers that believe it. If your brand isn’t devoting resources to tracking your environmental footprint, looking to your suppliers, their suppliers and the downstream affects of your products, it better start NOW. It’s money well spent as there are huge efficiencies to be achieved.

That’s not to say you should go off halfcocked into some sort of green crusade. Today’s consumer will crucify you if you greenwash and if they don’t the ACCC will.

I’m not going to go into the Do’s and Don’t of greening your brand in this post. What I will say is it makes great sense to have a long hard look at your company, it’s stakeholders and it’s impacts (“Triple Bottom Line”)

The environment gives way to sustainability

The shareholder model is out of date – it’s more about the stakeholder model now. Performing purely for profit is no longer enough in the eyes of this new consumer.

Today’s corporations should look to maintaining sustainable relationships with suppliers, employees, communities and even countries where they are located. Why?

Because your customers are now looking at you very closely - if they aren’t, Greenpeace and other environmental and consumer advocacy NGOs are. If they don’t like what you’re doing, they can stage elaborate shareholder AGM pranks and expose your actions to your shareholders or better still, go to your customers and tell them. They will find vulnerability. Look at Gunns Limited in Tasmania. Conservationists targeted Gunns’ customers in Japan and let them know of the environmental impact of the pulp they were buying. Share prices plummeted.  The CEO was toppled, Gunns has now come full circle and is now working with conservationists leading Gunns CEO to proclaim “Native forest is not part of our future.” Wow.  They now go so far as to claim they are “A leader in sustainable forestry and environmental management.”

Nestle also got schooled by Greenpeace recently for their use of palm oil sourced from an unethical supplier. Nestle learned the hard way that times have changed.

There are new examples pouring in every week. Like the PETA the “Cluck You McDonalds” prank last week:

or “Pink Cigarettes”. Companies are being exposed and shamed at a record rate and of course social media is a great way to fan the flames – more on that later.

All of these attention-grabbing antics of NGOs not only raise awareness of corporate wrongdoing, they are also designed to make consumers think about the things they buy. Nowadays consumers are more likely to think about your brand in terms of not just cost to their wallet but also to the environment:

Where was the product made?

 Are there any GMOs in the product?

Is the company well known as a fair employer?

Do they have a good environmental track record?

Is the meat component factory farmed?

What are those chemicals?

There are now smartphone apps to help consumers do a quick background check whilst they stand in the isle of the supermarket. Now that choice has become so broad, the consumer now has the benefit of being able to aid their decisions by laying their ethics over the products in the isles. 

Another interesting bit of news came to my attention last week. Alex Bogusky, (some call him a Ad God, a veritable rockstar of Adland) of Crispin, Porter & Bogusky has set up a new …hmm what to call it? I had heard he was one of the several high profile creatives to leave the US Ad industry a month ago – turns out he has set up a consumer advocacy … agency?  Called Fearless, Bogusky is mounting a revolution as the site’s home page states:

“corporations will impact our future as much as governments will. Voting beyond the ballot box with our purchasing power is rapidly becoming a powerful individual tool in the democratic experience”

So here’s a former major league ad guy changing sides. Whether you think he’s a hypocrite or a legend, to me it’s a signal.

The GFC:

When the GFC really hit I remember thinking “Damn, we were making such good ground on environmental issues, now it’s going to be all about price again.” But for all my concern about a race to the bottom of the price point, something else emerged.

Community. Positivity. Respect.

In such grim times, something really cool happened (well 2 key things I think): 

1. A return to more traditional values

People increasingly began to appreciate things like authenticity, heritage, community and quality. I think a lot of Master Chef’s early success can be attributed to this. The show was overtly ‘nice’. Contestants weren’t subjected to a Gordon Ramsey-like tirade of abuse, they were fed positive feedback, often given a second chance by the ever-so-nice panel. And of course, the show was about home cooking and real people we could all relate to. Look at Julie, the Mum and champion of homestyle honest and simple fare. It doesn’t get much more feelgood than that.  (I think all of the heritage messaging we’ve seen from many brands over the last few years has been a response to this trend.)

2. Corporate Greed

Consumers began to realise that the Free Market and unchecked growth may be a very dangerous thing– is there perhaps an alternative?

We have seen a growing rise in the ‘share & swap economy’ or Collaborative Consumption as social innovator, Rachel Botsman calls it.  Consumers have looked to economise and question the materialistic lifestyle marketers have sold them as their gateway to happiness. Looking to either get a second life from goods they no longer use or use rarely, sites like eBay, freecycle, clothing swaps, community gardens, car share companies like GoGet have all blossomed under these trying financial times. As Botsman puts it: “You don’t need the drill, you need the hole.” What has really helped this along is the ubiquity of technology and in particular, social media.

3. Social Media and Media Savvy

 The democratisation of information brought on by technology such as the internet, social media and personal tech such as smartphones has brought on and made possible some really cool stuff such as the Collaborative Consumption examples above but also how information about products and services gets shared or “Wikinomics” as Tapscott and Williams called it in their 2006 book.

Brand communication is no longer a one-way street. You know this. Not only are there consumer review sites, but a growing number of people are taking their gripes and questions about various products to facebook and Twitter. Again you will be well aware of this. You should have resources devoted to listening to these social media channels as you have a new breed of consumers who aren’t just going to complain if something is faulty, they’re going to complain if you’re out of step with your communications and if you’re out of step with your competitors when you used to take the lead.

Has anyone noticed that the Communications industry has really come to the fore lately? Shows like Mad Men, 30 Seconds and The Gruen Transfer have really opened the public’s eyes to various methods employed by advertisers and marketers. Now more than ever we have a very well educated and self aware consumer population. Even if they are not well educated it doesn’t take much to make a consumer very skeptical.

I’m not going to get into a comms model for speaking to this segment, I might get around to that later. I just wanted to bring this growing segment further to your attention and give my thoughts as to how it has come about.

My name is Steve and I am a conscious consumer.

 QR/2D barcodes in plain English for FMCG marketers

Some of you will have noticed over the last few weeks that mobile search has become quite the hot topic. A lot of the fuss has come from both Google and URL shortener company, Bit.ly making announcements around their own QR code generating platforms and of course, let’s not forget Google releasing Google Goggles in their Google Mobile app in the iTunes App Store last week.

So what is a QR code/2D barcode? According to Wikipedia: “A QR Code is a matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code), readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with a camera, and smartphones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data.”

And what does this all mean? Let’s go back a bit and see what Google has been saying and doing in recent times.

1.     They’ve launched Android: the mobile phone Operating System that is now currently the fastest growing phone OS in America is also outselling the Apple OS  and will do so here no doubt.  Unlike the Apple OS, Android is run on several different brands of handsets (HTC, Samsung, Motorola etc).

2.     Google has made a smartphone too  - the Nexus One has been scoring big points amongst the technoratti in America – although it hasn’t been selling particularly well here (I think has more to do with the fact that it hasn’t had the multimillion dollar campaign treatment of it’s Apple rival and we know how Australia loves a sexy sell.)

3.     OK now here’s the biggie, Google are investing heavily in mobile and Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management at Google announced that mobile "is the future of search in the internet"

4.     “Mobile is the new billboard” Everyone these days has a mobile phone AND carries it everywhere. It’s just a question of time before smartphones are as ubiquitous as the standard mobile phone. There are already 4 x more mobiles than PCs in Australia (according to John Galloway of the Hyperfactory) – it’s just a matter of time before these mobiles are smartphones. Many of you will have heard that 2010 is the year that smartphones are expected to outnumber PCs in the US.

Many digital strategists have been banging on about mobile for ages and will continue to do so until the wave actually hits (just pray we don’t get all high and mighty and say “We told you back in <insert year suitably audacious enough to the conversation they’re having> that mobile was going to be the future!”

No, I’m not forgetting search is also going more social. Many people now have such broad online social networks that asking a ‘friend’ on Facebook or a review site is now likely to have someone piping up with some feedback about a product or service. However, I think mobile search will be about information served fast. Many don’t have time to wait for a question to be answered on Facebook or search through loads of reviews on a shopping review site whilst they’re standing in the supermarket isle.

Enter the QR code:

As a marketer you want your consumers to hear what you have to say rather than what Google has to say about your product.

QR codes enable those with a web-enabled phone with an onboard camera to take a pic of this odd square patterned thing (depending on whose platform the publisher has subscribed to) and the phone’s web browser will fire up and take you to a page on the internet that the publisher/promoter/advertiser wants you to go to.

So if you’re a brand who wants people to like them on Facebook, the code can direct their browser to take them right to that page.

Say you have an FMCG brand with a special offer or a sales promotion, whilst standing in the supermarket isle, the shopper can go directly to a coupon (and at the same time sign them up to your database and collect some data off them maybe using their phone’s GPS) and download it to be redeemed at the checkout or an entry form meaning they don’t have to post off their entries and you don’t have to print the forms either! “What about proof of purchase?” I hear you say. Why, they can take a photo of it and send it via email in the same interaction of course! So you can put a code on your packaging or POS suite and have that address updated to whatever activation you have in market.

I think you have to make a QR action a 2 way street.

What I mean is if you’re going to ask people to go to the trouble of downloading an app, then pulling their phone out, scanning and waiting to be directed by their browsers to your content of choice, don’t just make it about asking them to “Like” you. Give them something in return. A voucher, a code, something that will delight them and make it worth their while otherwise they will feel used and that’s not a good sentiment to tie to your brand, is it?

Speaking of mechanics, all this talk of mobile technology has maybe got you thinking about Bluetooth. Personally I think this supersedes Bluetooth. Why? Because in Australia, mobile is still a little new to most consumers and technology that pushes itself onto your personal device is a little confronting for many consumers. Also I think there’s been some pretty bad executions of this useful platform. When you’re trying to do something on your handset like browse a website and it keeps getting interrupted by a barrage of Bluetooth messages, it gets frustrating. Even worse when all they are sending you is a poster (not even a mobile optimized image!) of a movie you have no interest in seeing and are standing in front of the damn poster anyway. Yes, Hoyts, I’m looking at you.

Here’s a handy site to find a QR reader for your phone

Week1:

So I have approached one of the agency partners and told him I felt we
needed to at look into making a few changes around the agency as we
were doing very little recycling and I felt there was huge room to
achieve some efficiencies thusly adding to the bottom line. (It was
around then that he started to listen.)

My plan is:

1. Audit:

Conduct an audit of current usage, waste and outputs to establish a
baseline. (Whilst keeping the project on the downlow so as to get an
unbiased tally.)

Once I have figured out volumes, I intend to examine in depth where I
can start to achieve efficiencies and also renegotiate with some of
our suppliers who up until now have not been accountable.

1. Recruit allies

I covertly email our studio manager, (let’s call him Trev) and ask him
if he can keep an eye on the “Recently Printed” box in the print room.
As I mentioned, I wanted to keep this audit quiet so as to get a
decent “control” volume of outputs. I also figure if I can start to
secretly recruit sympathisers as I go, the project will have a chance
at longevity and have other advocates.

I also ask Trev to make sure each used printer cartridge comes to me.

I do an audit of all the printers and the fax (amazing these things
still exist huh? We still need it but one of my goals is to find a way
to rid ourselves of this dinosaur age item)

As part of the audit, I measure and weigh each of the printer
cartridges in their boxes to calculate their impact on our waste
outputs. I also find a local ink/toner recycler and ask which of our
carts they refill.