green is universal

Carbon-Neutral Ad Campaign for Versus Network

Posted at 06:48 PM on November 08, 2007 comments (4)

By Guy Barnett, The Brooklyn Brothers

Unlike Al Gore, certain CNN anchors and the growing army of eco-worriers, I've never believed the planet is in peril due to climate change. In its 4.5 billion year history, the earth has survived periods of being a fireball and a snowball and come out of both capable of sustaining life. So global warming is of little concern to the earth.

It is, however, a trifle more worrying if you happen to enjoy living on this planet. Which I do. And if you're on this site, you probably do, too.

The trouble is what can you do?

My company, the Brooklyn Brothers, is not what you'd call a major polluter: mainly we do advertising (a different kind of pollution for sure but not a major contributor to global warming). And when you consider that 8 billion tons of carbon are emitted into the atmosphere every year, the effect of our small business is negligible.

Still, we thought, what little we could do, we were determined to do. So we set about offsetting all our carbon emissions, not just for our offices but for every production we organized, too. We employed an environmental consultant, ERM, to help us develop a software tool to calculate our emissions. And we enlisted the cable network Versus to be our first advertiser.

Every aspect of the production was taken into account: from the round trip flights to the chemicals used in film processing to the power generators on set. The resulting campaign of a dozen spots is, we believe, the world's first carbon-neutral ad campaign.

Sure, it's a small step. But if you take it too, maybe, just maybe, we'll get somewhere.

Guy Barnett, Co-founder
The Brooklyn Brothers
http://www.thebrooklynbrothers.com