Have you heard of Earth Hour? It’ll be here in four more days…this Saturday, from 8-9 p.m.
Last year in Sydney, where it debuted, city denizens were encouraged to turn off lights and electrical
appliances for a full hour from 8-9 p.m. on March 31. With local governments pitching in, Sydney recorded reduced electricity usage over the hour ranging from 2 to 10%. It was all part of a “statement” to draw attention to global warning and was sponsored by the World Wildlidfe Fund and the Sydney Morning Herald with a lot of pro bono support from Leo Burnett Australia. See Leo’s commercial here.
Now, almost a year later, Earth Hours are being planned for nearly two dozen cities globally, including Chicago, which is serving as America’s flagship city for this effort. I first heard about the Earth Hour at a Mayor’s Council of Technology Advisors meeting a couple of months ago, where the City’s Environmental Commissioner and representatives from Leo Burnett spoke.
An interesting idea. Will you turn off your lights? Will the effort work to educate people about global warming? Is it, in the end, just a well-intentioned gimmick that will be forgotten once it passes? Or will it have legs and expand to many more cities large and small in 2009? And make a difference?
with all the electricity shut off for a whole hour at night, what will people do in the dark? I bet, 9 months from now, there’ll be a baby boom!
I will definitely do. I will have many more lights to turn off in my new apartment but I am eager to continue my energy-savings to the new space, including using available light, CF bulbs, turning off and unplugging unused appliances. it also will extend to water conservation and using natural or homemade cleaning products. a lot of these initiatives can be translated to our workplace with minimal effort and strong support.
I’m planning on going down by the Shedd Aquarium to get a good view of the skyline prior to 8pm. Should be a pretty cool site.
Gary: It’s ironic to see you of all people citing ANY work by the Leo B company. Didn’t you famously picket them for their tobacco work — a la the Marlboro Man — when they handled the Philip Morris account? Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. And if you didn’t picket them you should have!
— Steve
Great memory, Steve. Yes, a number of years ago I was briefly involved in an effort by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, then run by my former boss, Bill Novelli (now the CEO of AARP), to shame ad and PR agencies into resigning their tobacco accounts. The thinking (mine at least): while tobacco farmers arguably may have limited vocational mobility, marketers have no such limitations and can easily choose to avoid working for companies like Phillip Morris (now Altria) if they find their products and practices objectionable (as I do). One of our activities in Chicago was to hand out flyers, asking Leo Burnett to resign its Phillip Morris client, to Burnett employees as they entered the Chicago Theatre for an annual company meeting. Can’t quite call it picketing, but I was there, along with a handful of other volunteers, handing out flyers and no doubt irritating the Leo Burnett brass. Leo Burnett still works for Altria, so the effort had little, if any, effect. It is strange to see one side of Leo Burnett stoking the fortunes of a very unpopular industry, as it’s done for decades, and another side of the company, working on the other side of the world, supporting what many believe to be a noble cause. But such is the world, I guess. A few years back I was surprised to see Leo Burnett hired by Northwestern Memorial Hospital to be its new ad agency, a move that I thought had to have been highly controversial among at least some cardiologists and other physicians there. The relationship didn’t last, but I suspect it was over creative or other issues, not the ethics of a hospital system using its healthcare profits to line the pockets of a provider to the tobacco industry.