Marketers constantly ask their customers what they want/need from their products and services. They run focus groups, do usability studies, hire design experts, scour data for product-use trends, etc., etc.

So why don’t they ever ask customers what they want/need from marketing communications? (and I don’t mean the standard “how can we communicate with you more effectively?” kind of thing. I mean straight up, as in “what do you want from us which can be delivered to you online, in the mail, on TV or via some other medium”??)

We are always going to promote good/services with some form of marketing communications or another. In the past this was largely an interruptive process, now the best markers offer their customers communications that are inherently valuable/useful (e.g., OfficeMax’s “Elf Yourself”).

Why not just ask them what they need (e.g., content, digital utilities or peer-networking utilities) and offer it, along with some non-obtrusive indication that your brand is the one supplying the goods?

Good day to all!

So it is sad that Earth Week is now behind us, and all the trivia prizes have been won and distributed, but that fact just makes it more important for us at PHD Sustain to double down and keep the momentum going. Read on for an update on that.

Announcement:

Keurig/Green Mountain Coffee Q&A - There have been many questions heard regarding the new Keurig coffee machine and Green Mountain’s coffee/tea in terms of how truly “green” or “sustainable” they are. A representative for the company will be at PHD tomorrow, Friday, May 2nd at 11:30am in Emerging Tech to present their Green initiatives, including information on their Fair Trade and environmental sustainability practices. Handouts/brochures will be made available as well as much time left for a Q&A to address any and all curiosities or concerns. Snacks will be provided as a further incentive to stop by!

Recent Developments:

• Conservation International - Thanks to all of you who turned out to hear from Laura Bowling of CI this past Monday as the inaugural speaker in PHD Sustain’s continuing education program. She was very pleased with the response from PHD and thanked us all for the opportunity of introducing CI and its mission to the agency. Keep an eye out for the new CI campaign in development with BBDO including a TV PSA with Harrison Ford and a brand new campaign for Print and Online as well. PHD is working with CI to secure media to maximize the exposure of this new campaign to increase their awareness, drive web traffic for incremental subscribers and ultimately deliver greater donations to the cause. For more information on CI, please visit www.conservation.org.
• Emerging Media Sustainability Index - Dr. Horvath from Berkeley has been hard at work investigating emissions and averages for all media channels. He was here at PHD this past Monday to report on his progress and findings. Surprisingly for some, electronic media is not necessarily as “green” as one might think. Next steps are for Dr. Horvath to provide formulas and sources to Colspace, the developer for the Index tool, and then to evaluate the list of alternative “green” media options provided to him during his visit to PHD.
• Coffee Mugs - A significant supply of PHD branded mugs have been ordered and will arrive within 3 weeks. Thereafter, all disposable paper coffee cups in the PHD kitchen will be removed in lieu of the more sustainable solution of utilizing re-usable mugs. These will be for personal and client meeting uses within our offices.
• Organic Milk - Beginning next week, PHD will now be ordering only organic milk for employee use. Rest assured that there will still be a choice of whole, skim, etc..

The PHD Sustain team are still looking for enthusiastic volunteers to help us move projects forward at an even faster pace. Our current team is quite small, with everyone having a full-time responsibility beyond sustain, so we cannot do it all alone! Drop a line to phd.sustain@phdus.com if you can offer some time.

Wishing you all sustainable thoughts,

PHD Sustain Team

Well, happy Earth Week to one and all! Yes, it is true that our excitement over our sustain initiative cannot be contained in just one 24 hour period…no single Earth Day for us.

Starting tomorrow, April 22nd on the official Earth Day celebration, get ready for GREEN TRIVIAL PURSUIT. Periodically throughout the day and each day for the rest of the week, you’ll have multiple chances to win some eco-friendly prizes while learning a bit more about sustainability as well.

Other Recent Developments

• No Sustain Update last week - that’s right…nothing much new…so the Sustain team is not going to waste your time with fluff. When you hear from us, we hope it’s because we have something of value or of interest to share.
• 2-day visit from ISO 14001 Consultant - Our consultant, Gene Samsel, is the guy who is preparing us to get all our ducks in a row so that we pass the Audit when the ISO registrar visits to assess our environmental program. He spent April 17/18 in our offices. While he met with the whole PHD Sustain team, it is Thomas Kiedrowski who gets a real shout out for spending extensive hours with Gene. They identified the significant environmental aspects we will target and a framework for next steps to meet ISO specifications. Essentially, to have any chance to secure ISO 14001 registration, PHD will have show that we will:
  • obey laws and regulations
  • obey any customer requirements
  • set objectives and targets to reduce pollution
  • have a plan in place to continually improve
• SIGG water bottles for all PHD employees - To reduce the use of plastic water bottles at PHD, the agency will be providing everyone their very own PHD-branded stainless steel bottle for fill up at our filtered water stations. As SIGG production runs are limited, we will not receive our bottles for a few weeks now. In the meantime, check out the design mock-up attached here. PHD Sustain Water Bottle Design

Did you know?

• Conservation International (CI) is a new PHD client and will be undertaking its first-ever media campaign. CI will very likely be the first participant in PHD’s continuing education program on sustainability. Watch out for time and place announcement shortly. CI’s SVP of Strategic Marketing and Communications, Laura Bowling, has graciously volunteered to repeat a learning session she just gave to BBDO on CI’s mission and the broader issue of the impact of deforestation on climate change. It is an incredibly enlightening and inspirational talk.
• This week’s Green tip will be delivered separately and in great number during Earth Week’s Green Trivial Pursuit game.

After a weekend communing with nature (ok…a Saturday afternoon, but the sentiment remains!), I returned to the office today with a renewed sense of purpose in our sustain campaign and appreciation for what this state of ours has to offer outside the confines of the city.     The planet we live on is truly awe-inspiring.

Speaking of our planet:

EARTH DAY is Tuesday, April 22nd! 

Only 15 days away!  Keep your eyes open for some special activities in the office that day as you know the PHD Sustain team cannot just let the occasion go by….

Recent Developments:

• PHD Sustain has its own e-mail address!  Send all comments, suggestions, green tips, newsletter entries (your own inspirational poem perhaps??) and offers to join the team to PHD.Sustain@phdus.com
• New Coffee Machine and Water Units now installed in kitchens
  • So, what size are you??  4, 6, 8 or a big 10 oz.?
  • Yes, trial and error to find your most tasty cup
  • For those who are troubled by the small Green Mountain coffee selection, never fear, as we are just exhausting current older coffee supplies first before expanding our Organic/Free Trade offerings further.
•  35% recycled paper already in use in copiers and printers.  Working to increase that percentage if possible while maintaining sufficient print quality.
• PHD challenging 220 E. 42nd St mgmt.  Requesting “greener” cleaning materials, questioning recycling practices, and generally working to have the building move forward on sustainability just as we are.

Did You Know?

• Double-sided printing is an easy way to reduce paper usage and waste. 
  •  Not all printers at PHD have the capability currently, but the Xerox color printer in the main copy room does.  IT will work to broaden this capability further as replacement printers are brought in. How To: Print Double-Sided
  • Copiers all have ability to convert single-sided originals to double-sided copies.  Your colleagues and clients will notice and appreciate your efforts to conserve.
• Properly formatting spreadsheets and other documents before printing or e-mailing helps ensure that waste is minimized by you and others correspond with.  Print Preview is your friend! 

Until next time…think GREEN thoughts.

Welcome to the first edition of the PHD SUSTAIN weekly update!

Our promise to you, our readers, is a regular, easily digestible (read: short!) summary of the progress being made in the “greening” of our workplace and further in our work with the development of PHD’s proprietary Environmental Media Sustainability Index and green media planning tool.

While we may never fully please the Treehugger-faithful with every step we take, our commitment is simply to do the best we can as a team at PHD to create a “greener” footprint. We promise never to be preachy and instead celebrate each and every green change any of us make in our lives at work and beyond.

The PHD Sustain Team is all of us who work at PHD. Our ultimate success in becoming more sustainable depends on you!

Recent Developments:

• Look out for NEW COFFEE AND TEA MACHINE later this week!Organic and Fair Trade

• -Multiple strengths and flavors
• -More efficient clean-up
• -Not plastic-free yet but best available and supplier working on improvements

• FILTERED WATER STATIONS to debut in both kitchens this week!

• -Use glass pitchers and glasses for water for meetings, to be found in cabinets above sink in either kitchen
• -Each employee to receive personal, re-usable water bottle (SIGG brand or similar) within the next month in an effort to get rid of all plastic water bottles at PHD

• PHD received electrical inspection from National Energy Services (NES) on March 4th already in great environmental shape with energy efficient lights and lighting levels; no immediate steps needed.

• PHD offices seeking highly regarded International Standards Organization (ISO) 14001 registration and working with Euro Quest International to achieve this. Consultant Gene Sammsel to evaluate PHD offices on April 17-18 to lay out further plan of action.

Did You Know?

• Though we currently need to log off but not shut down on our computers when we go home at night so that IT can do network updates overnight, everyone can save energy by clicking off their monitors when heading out the door.

• -Repeat after me: LOG OFF, MONITOR OFF LOG OFF, MONITOR OFF LOG OFF, MONITOR OFF

• The revolving door is not just a device to make us feel like gerbils on an exercise wheel. It saves heat and AC compared to doors that open directly to the outside. When entering and exiting a building with a revolving door option…use it and feel good about yourself!

• CUMULUS has moved! No…nothing green about that…just thought you should know. It has been re-located to John Swift’s old office right next to Strategic Planning’s home base.

This weekly update will be posted on the PHD blog for future reference as well (http://perspectives.phdus.com).

Please do share thoughts, comments, and suggestions on this weekly update or anything related to the “greening” of PHD. They will be read and duly considered…no auto delete or anything…we swear! From next week, PHD Sustain should have its own e-mail address. In the interim, send a note to Michael De Lucia, Mary Florcruz, or Thomas Kiedrowski. Failing that, just accost us in the hall.

Thanks for all your enthusiasm and cooperation!

I’m happy to announce a new initiative called PHD Sustain that I and the Green Team at PHD have been working for the last ten months. The project has finally taken off so I can now share it with all of you.

PHD Sustain is our agency’s commitment to our people, our clients and our planet in becoming more environmentally friendly, and thereby more sustainable. This commitment will be lived out in two main ways: where we work and how we work.

Where We Work – Greening Our Offices
We’ve started making a few changes to green our offices, such as printing on recycled paper, reducing our energy usage, etc. However, our big push starts in April, when we will have a consultant come in to help us measure our environmental footprint, set goals and an action plan to reduce that footprint, and educate and inspire our employees to partake in fully greening our offices. We hope that these efforts will allow us to get ISO 14001 certified later this year.

How We Work – Developing and Using the Environmental Media Sustainability Index
After the release of An Inconvenient Truth and when it seemed like every company was coming out with some sort of green message in their advertising, we began to think about green media. What could green media be? How could we help our clients not only say they are green, but act green as well?

With the help of our Green Team we researched and brainstormed all of the different green media options out there, such as magazines printed on recycled paper, low energy billboards, etc. However, we still couldn’t tell which options were better for the environment than others. Luckily, during our research we stumbled upon Yale’s Environmental Sustainability Index, which numerically quantifies the impact of every country on the environment. This inspired us to create our own index for different media channels and vehicles called the Environmental Media Sustainability Index or EMSI. This online system will not only help us measure the impact of our media plans on the environment, it will also help our media planners source and use green media options for our clients.

So far we’ve hired and had a great kick off meeting with Dr. Horvath of UC Berkley, an expert in the study of environmental lifecycles. Together we mapped out the life cycle of each media channel, such as TV, magazines, newspapers, billboards, radio, cinema, online, mobile phones, bus shelters, and direct mail, from post-production to disposal. Right now he is helping us by researching and measuring the impact of each media channel and will report back to us in late April. We’ll use this data to develop the EMSI.

Overall, we are very excited to rollout PHD Sustain and the EMSI over the next year. Please continue to check back here for updates.

It was sent around the office in a flash.  With lines like: “OMG!  I love it!  Let’s get some cosmos!” it could only mean one thing: an extended trailer for the new Sex in the City movie has hit the web.

HBO (a PHD client) and its sister company, New Line Cinema, both have a history of great promotions: HBO devised a terrific out of home campaign around the Sopranos and New Line incorporated some of the first social media tools on its Austin Powers movie sites.  But this one was different.

Sex in the City fans have been waiting for more details on the show’s big screen debut since the abbreviated trailer hit screens in December.  By all accounts, the extended trailer was available online on the morning of February 22 and then removed by New Line later that day.  What gives?  Is this the best way to reward some of HBO and New Line’s most loyal customers?

It turns out that the promotions department delivered again.  From a high-brow perspective, they were able to combine the economics model of scarcity and the psychological model of loss aversion to make people feel as if they absolutely must see the trailer immediately!!

From a practical point of view, a handful of Sex in the City fans saw the trailer and those people were happy to pass it along to their friends.  As soon as the fervor started to build, the trailer was no longer available.  But New Line knew its audience: instead of just giving up, these fans realized that the preview was out there, it just took some hunting.

And that is where the real promotion began.  Emails started flying and sites like Jezebel (spoiler alert!) were able to embed the preview and garner a huge uptick in site traffic.  And even a few days later, Sex in the City fans were talking about the trailer with a sense of exclusivity, even leading mainstream outlets to provide a second-by-second breakdown for those who missed it (and can’t find it online).

Hats off to New Line and HBO: what a great and simple way to start a viral word of mouth campaign.

One role the Strategic Planning Group @ PHD is happy to play in the life of the agency is to provoke critical thought (media-based or otherwise). When such attempts resonate, they can inspire news ways of looking at targeting, behavior, communications, etc. To this end, we’ve been offering a monthly respite from the rigors of daily work called “Inspiration Sessions”; an opportunity to quit Excel, turn the Blackberry off, and think about something explicitly provocative (and implicitly relevant).

A recent session featured Jill Botway, Omnicom’s President of US Strategic Business Units and first female member of the prestigious Explores Club. Jill discussed what she had learned about teamwork while exploring previously uncharted regions of Indonesia with a room filled with media planning/buying professionals.

In another approach to inspiration, we have conducted “White Sessions.” White Sessions, like white papers, are intended to offer up deep dives into issues otherwise considered too technical for casual consumption. Unlike white papers, however, White Sessions harness the power of video to present content that is actually inspiring, as presented by people who are actual experts in their field.

Last Friday we had a White Session based on a TED presentation by Wade Davis (A National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence). Wade’s mind-boggling talk covers his experiences with cultures radically different than our own, encountered in his anthropological and ethno-botanical studies.

As media professionals, we are often required to profile/segment groups of people by their attitudes and behaviors. Wade’s talk certainly explodes the idea that the variables we use to define/describe groups of consumer are fixed, or necessary properties. My belief is that we can become better observers of culture by realizing just how arbitrary culture actually is…

Here’s a very cool read and an interesting case for the power of word of mouth, creative channel and partnership selection, as well as a stellar example of Connect strategy. That and there’s a whole lotta love for the co-op model and its ability to breed powerful and effective brand communications. That is, from the inside out. All wrapped up and delivered to your door. I like.

Read about Dabbawalas

After years of experience and time spent collecting input from his friends and colleagues, filmmaker Peter Gruber shares what he has identified as the four truths of being a good storyteller. What he presents is very applicable to our work at PHD. Afterall, we have ‘audiences’ just as businessmen have customers and filmmaker’s have ticket buyers. Our interaction and relationship with consumers, established through messaging and communications campaigns is, in essence, storytelling.

I recommend reading the entire article to see how each of the four truths identified below lives within all great stories, but here are a few quick thoughts on how to apply the four truths of storytelling to advertising and media.

True to the Teller: Be true to yourself and your audience, making them feel what you feel. It allows them to identify with you. This involves being human and relatable. Gruber states. “Although the mind may be part of your target, the heart is the bull’s eye.” Think about this when identifying target audiences and developing consumer profiles.

True to the Audience: Relate to what’s important to the audience. Make them see themselves as the hero. Again, important for contexts, consumer profiles and messaging.

True to the Moment: Tailor your message delivery to each moment/situation.

True to the Mission: Stick to your guns. Audiences appreciate the storyteller’s honesty and conviction more than hearing what we think the want to hear (we’ve seen this work in new business pitches). Advertisers need to be as true on the inside as they are on the out. Practice what you preach.