Innovations: Eureka!

The August 2007 issue of National Geographic magazine was shrink-wrapped in a petroleum-based film that packaged up the issue with a DVD titled “Eureka.” It was labeled at the bottom “A Shell Films Production.” On the DVD was a nine-minute film about a Shell oil engineer from the Netherlands who, according to the copy on the back, “is passionate about saving the world’s energy resources,” and who “struggles to solve the problem of leaving ‘undrillable’ oil behind.”

My kids will watch anything on TV, so I popped in the DVD and we watched it together. It was an engaging story with very expensive production values — shooting in multiple countries, use of helicopters and oil platforms, etc.

But let me save you nine minutes: The engineer was sharing a milkshake with his teenage son when the son took his straw out and bent the end to a 90 degree angle so the straw could reach every corner of the bulbous milkshake glass and suck up all the previously “undrillable” ice cream. This inspired the engineer to create flexible drills. The parent and teenage son bonded. More oil that “would just be lying there” is now drillable. Everyone’s happy. What a great story.

In my last column, I wrote about how the British ended the Atlantic slave trade 200 years ago at an estimated cost to their GNP similar to the cost economists estimate we would bear if we as a country seriously addressed the challenge of global warming. I wrote how in addition to great leadership, a vocal public comprising hundreds of thousands of citizens protested over many years, including boycotting Caribbean sugar. It has been curious to me why there really is no similar sense of urgency among the general public in the United States now, and it seems unlikely that there will be. Why is that the case? In short, I believe, it is because of things like “Eureka.”

One profession that has grown amazingly sophisticated over the past century is that of public relations and communications. Global companies care a great deal about their brand, and they measure attitudes toward it regularly.

Global communications firms including Fleishman-Hillard and Hill & Knowlton either already have or are creating sustainability practice groups to help serve their clients. In the middle of a panel discussion I participated in last month in front of Fleishman-Hillard’s global Social Impact team, it struck me that these people and their several thousand colleagues at other firms around the world may actually hold the balance of power in terms of whether or not a tipping point that gets people and governments to truly act will actually be reached.

Based on my observations of the sophistication and talent of the communications profession, the most likely outcome is that the public’s concern will never reach a level of outrage.

Communications professionals — who are constantly measuring things to see whether the outrage level might be rising — will advise their clients to do enough to prevent the outrage from happening. Both these communications professionals and their clients probably actually want to (and believe they are) doing good deeds when they reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 10 percent or find a way to drill for undrillable oil. But the act of publicizing these achievements, which are relatively minor in terms of their impact on climate change, serves to completely undermine the general public’s desire to take the steps truly needed to address the issue.

Think about it.

You’re busy at your job, dropping off kids at school, doing the grocery shopping. Sure you sometimes worry about larger issues such as the war in Iraq or climate change. But then you see an ad or a TV show that says so-and-so large company is doing such and such to combat climate change, and you mentally check that item off on your list of things to worry about. “If GE and Honda are doing all of this good stuff, then I really don’t need to worry about it,” you may think, even if only subconsciously.

One senior communication consultant recently told me her firm had developed the 10 Commandments of communicating sustainability for Fortune 500 companies. One of the commandments was that the message “needs to be put in aspirational terms.”

“We know it works in the United States and Europe,” she said proudly. “We’re not sure about Asia yet.” I wonder how she defines “works”?

In other words, you don’t really have to be doing much, you just have to be aspiring to do better. (USA Today recently reported GE’s entire 2007 corporate advertising budget is being spent on their Ecomagination campaign.) Then your employees will feel good about your company and there will be no public outrage. Actually addressing the problem can be done later.

I used to think having companies talk about how green they were was all-in-all a good thing, even if their claims were not necessarily true or of great significance. Now I believe that all of the green communication noise out there in terms of advertising, videos, press releases, etc. actually just serves to make the general public feel as if the issue of climate change is being addressed, and they don’t really need to worry about it.

My 101-year-old grandmother passed away in late July. She was a true character, and her favorite expression was “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” I actually don’t think these senior communications people, their colleagues or the people who hire them are intending to deceive the public. I think they actually want to make change. I just think the results of the bulk of their sustainability-related activities are having exactly the opposite effect. It would be nice for at least one of these firms to craft detailed internal policies for their new “sustainability practice groups” that would prevent this from happening.

What might this look like? How about starting with some minimum threshold of significance that a company’s action has to have before a press release is issued. Better yet, they should simply refuse to do corporate green ad campaigns at all unless the company is carbon neutral. That’s the only way to launch a “sustainability practice group” within a global PR firm and have it mean anything.

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The Innovations column by Nik Blosser, president of Celilo Group Media, appears every other month in Sustainable Industries. Contact Nik at nik@celilo.net.