Monday, August 27, 2007

Big-time Climate Change Ad Campaign

ADAMANT (see he has Ad in his non-mADison Avenue name!) directs us to a major media/ad buy:

Madison Ave. Warms to Climate Change
Shops Vie for Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection Biz

Not too long ago, a premier ad agency wouldn't touch a campaign warning about the effects of global warming, fearing backlash from the automakers and oil companies that keep Madison Avenue's lights on. But now one of the most hotly contended pitches out there is for the Alliance for Climate Protection, the organization formed last year by Al Gore.

Four elite agencies -- Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the Martin Agency and Y&R -- are squaring off for the business and are expected to present to the former vice president himself early next month, according to executives familiar with the review. The budget for the "historic, three-to-five-year, multimedia global campaign," as the request for proposals puts it, is contingent on how much money the alliance raises. Media spending will likely be more than $100 million a year.

That elite shops aren't scared off from crafting environmental messaging that could be tacitly critical of big business's sometimes unsustainable ways is yet another sign of the mainstreaming of green thinking within the corporate world at large. And within the ad community it points to newfound willingness to embrace hot-button social causes. The alliance account, some are saying, could even lend some luster to the winner's roster, given many major marketers' recent embrace of sustainability throughout their value chains, from product development to manufacturing to marketing communications.
More from Ad Age
Here's the version with the picture of Mr. Gore.

Mr. Seitz also outdid himself with the headline for
another post:

Crazy Bayes & That Rascal Pascal
“Science ” was a word quite unknown when London's Royal Society was founded in 1660. Until a generation after the American revolution, the Society's focus was referred to as "natural philosophy", but nature and philosophy parted company as the natural philosophers assumed power in the Victorian Establishment....More at ADAMANT.