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.

Adding some fuel to the trend spotting culture at PHD, strategic planning gave a talk last week about hot cultural movements and emerging trends. Here’s a quick recap.

First off, culture is not highbrow or distant, it is simply what people think, do, and create. The keyword is people and culture helps us understand them. Trends in culture arise when a group of people, who share mindsets, behaviors and attitudes reach a critical mass or in research speak, sample size.

So the first step in successfully identifying a trend is to find a theme within what people, think, do and create. This can be anywhere, films, food, music, politics, art, architecture, sport, etc. The next step is to make sure that you can find this theme across multiple touch points and that it has reached a critical mass. The key is to always be on the look out. So try that new restaurant, go to that weird play, and keep spotting.

Thanks to everyone who joined us. Excellent questions, debate and dialogue!

Shop by text. Yes, all of you shopaholics can now text a short code with your cell to purchase new products after registering at www.shoptext.com. While the number of users and products available are still quite limited, this application may become increasingly popular as more people discover the ease of purchasing whenever, wherever.

See a product that you’d like in an ad? Text the short code at the bottom of the ad to purcase it right away.

Museums are using innovative new ways to share the story behind the exhibition and elaborate on the art featured.

This winter for the installation Sleepwalkers, films were projected on the exterior walls of the MOMA. Rather than offering a headset to guide the tour, the museum provided a phone number for visitors to call from their cell phones and listen to commentary by the curator and the artist Doug Aiken, adding depth and meaning to the experience.

Following suit, Cooper Hewitt’s top notch Design Life Now exhibition, provides podcasts available on iTunes recorded by the artists featured in the exhibition, such as illustrator Chip Kidd and founder of Kidrobot, Paul Budnitz. This made my meander through the exhibition much more informed without the hassle of a formal tour or an audio guide from my neck. Click here to download a few before you go. This exhibition rocks.

While the advent of Photoshop enabled advertisers to create flawless images to represent their brands, many have reverted to using handmade art to do the same job in a more authentic manner. At the PSFK Trends, Ideas and Inspiration Conference, trend spotter Wendy Dumbo interviewed commercial artists Laurie Rosenwald and Scott Campbell on the subject.

Rosenwald is a New York City artist, who creates whimsical collage and ink drawings embraced by clients, such as Ikea and The New Yorker. Out of her many personalized techniques, she touted the value of a truly original font, created by hand with all its flaws and ink spots. She asserted that the hand drawn font is infinitely more unique than one found in a font library and inevitably used over and over again by hundreds of other graphic designers, who so often rely upon the resources and approaches dictated by their Macs and Adobe programs.

Similarly, tattoo artist Campbell has also found a commercial niche in creating handcrafted artwork. He talked about his training at a tattoo parlor and time spent taking direction from those whose bodies he was decorating, the ultimate art directors. The beauty and cool factor of his designs lead to a request from Camel to design an entire campaign. Nike has also recently commissioned him to hand draw the design for the 2007 Olympic uniforms. And Campbell now has his own line of tattooed furniture at Barney’s, after all as Dumbo pointed out the ultimate luxury is a handmade object.

During the interviews both artists conveyed a passion for their individual artistic approach, which results in a truly unique and authentic end product. Authenticity is a quality that our society now so often craves and rarely finds, which is why demand for these artists by big brands is so high. In such a computer reliant world, I wonder how we can bring authenticity and a unique hand crafted touch to our clients.

When Steven Spielberg produced Minority Report, reporters and critics praised him for his detailed consultation of a think tank of MIT futurologists. Indeed, the film was an impressive glimpse at what the future could hold. One particularly discomforting scene is when Tom Cruise walks through a mall and is barraged with advertising messages completely personalized to him and his location in the mall. The voice of a man invites him by name for a Guinness as an image of several pints flash up on a wall. (See clip below.)

The scene is overwhelming and creepy, but is this what advertising may some day resemble?

Closest Thing to the Future: Japan?
We are not at this level of personalized location based advertising yet, but we are one step closer. If you were to visit Tokyo today, you could point a new type of cell phone at a building and receive information and ads about it from the Internet, such as room rates for a hotel, type of food served at a restaurant, or the hours of a museum. You could also use this phone to receive directions and track your movement towards a specific location. Say you wanted to check out a sushi place nearby, you could click on restaurants, point your phone in any direction, and be provided with a popup menu of choices in that area. You could then select a restaurant and follow the directions provided, while tracking your location in relation to the destination on the map on your cell phone screen as seen in the picture on the left. Check out an animated demo here.

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Dr. Shibata of The Intelligent Systems Research Institute in Japan has developed an amazing baby seal. Well, it’s actually a robot named Paro – the world’s most therapeutic robot as declared by Guinness World Records (2002). Paro is fed with a pacifier attached to an electrical cord and wiggles in seeming delight when pet or cuddled.

Similar to real animal assisted therapy, contact with Paro by patients helps improve their vital signs, decreases stress and helps activate communication between patients and caregivers. Paro has been a particularly effective friend for the elderly, who are often some of the loneliest members of modern society.

In addition, it has been discovered that by giving patients a Paro, caregivers have to spend less time with them. While giving a patient a Paro may be cheaper than spending more time with patient, the substitution of robots for human interaction and care makes me uncomforable.