Thursday 4 October 2007

Applied Green


Yesterday's Applied Green was full of rich insights, inspiring stories & nice people. I think the overall theme of the day was that we are hitting a new phase where innovation ie great ideas are needed to pull us all forward. My version of all of that was a presentation saying that (based on survey data) people have got the doom & gloom message - comparable to the impact AIDS had on the public consciousness - what they are waiting for is big ideas like Safe Sex; which will be born out of the conflict between desire and restraint.

Russell Davies made the point that some people still wanted things that looked & felt like Hummers. Too true. I think that is actually the whole rationale for the mountain bike; it is the 4x4 of cycling - an idea which the photo says better than my words.

My charts are here in case anyone wants a flickr through, but really you had to be there :J

ps if you did miss it Ben Terret who did a brilliantly graphic talk called "I'm a designer use me better" has also posted not only his slide but the text of what he said, pretty verbatim. noisydecentgraphocslink

1 comment:

david Hawksworth said...

Hi John,

Hope your second presentation went well - you were just running off there when I came over to say hi.

If I'm honest I have been taking green issues seriously (i.e actually doing something) for about 48 hours now by going to the conference yesterday and an off site day today where my big agency network kind of admitted that they are in the same place as me but are ready to do something about it.

So from the perspective of knowing nothing I thought the day was really good.

It kind of felt like my first day in marketing really. Though the general mantra is to keep reminding yourself that you know only a fraction of anything, actually the general experience is that you get used to knowing quite a lot about stuff i.e. rehashing things you remember from a presentation you did once.

Going back to being an absolute novice is a bit scary but pretty exciting as well. Kind of like when I worked in the basic part of media and first saw the scope for the ideas and innovation of proper planning.

The big revelation for me is that green marketing seems like a useful outlet for all the ideas that people who work in agencies want to have but can't because of the model that everyone thinks is broken but won't go away. Whereas with green marketing it simply won't wash - gloss, nice messages, advertising innovation, image creation, changing perception etc.. versus meaningful, real actions, brand innovation, changing behavior... just on a personal level, who wouldn't want to do that.

Cheers,

David