Happy 2010 from all of us at HY-brid and Hoffman York. At the end of last year I started what I hope will become a longstanding series of interviews with ‘green’ thought leaders. My first conversation was with Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Inc., and we talked about his company’s approach to sustainability. What a great story!

My latest conversation is with Rob Watson. Described as “one of the best environmental minds in America,” Watson discusses his thoughts on sustainability in business, environmental responsibility and how having ‘fathered’ the one rating system that is internationally recognized is truly humbling. He also dives deep into why an organization needs to communicate its sustainability efforts. He tells me communication of these efforts is ‘vitally important’ and that telling the story is fundamental in generating impact across all industries.

As the “Father of LEED” and one of the leading experts in the international high performance green building movement, he has a two-decade track record of delivering cutting-edge green projects and programs worldwide. His new company, EcoTech International brings an unparalleled combination of green building expertise, innovation and key “cleantech” technology solutions to China, India and the United States. So, it goes without say, that business leaders should give a listen to what he has to say.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to talk with Rob. As one of the world’s most influential environmental leaders, he offers a unique perspective on sustainability. Turns out he has the same outlook as HY-brid. I hope you enjoy listening to my conversation with him as much I did having it. Whether it’s your first steps, or if you have already begun down the path, I hope this Podcast inspires you to look more in-depth at what you are doing to address your sustainability efforts. As always, HY-brid would like to help you communicate those efforts. So give us call or send us an email, it’s why we’re here.

Subscribe to our Podcast via RSS or download the interview (m4a file) or listen below.

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The following is a guest blog authored by Paul von Paumgartten. Read more about Paul at the end of the post.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 7 years since the 1st Greenbuild in Austin, Texas. In 2002, a little more than 4,000 people attended and there were only a few hundred exhibitors. By the way, we (the USGBC) were thrilled with those numbers for a first year show. This year in Phoenix, we had over 25,000 attendees and more than 1000 exhibitors. Even in a down economy, the “green building movement” is alive and well. There is, however, a major shift occurring in the green world. For the last decade, the green building movement has been dominated by the design community and construction of new buildings.

The focus is now shifting to the existing building market. One obvious reason is the devastating decline in the new construction market. The economic downturn is not expected to turn around anytime soon so the new construction industry is turning to the existing building stock for relief. The challenge for them is that the existing building market is totally different— different players, different drivers, different buyers, different everything. That isn’t stopping everyone from moving in that direction though. One only has to look at the size of our existing building stock – 4.7 million commercial buildings, 70 billion square feet, and the majority use 30% more energy than they need to.

The new trend could be called Retrogreening – the retrofit and greening of existing buildings. The blending of energy efficiency and high performance green buildings was featured in several Greenbuild education sessions. One in particular presented two iconic projects – The Empire State Building and the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower). These highly successful projects are using the retrogreening process to harvest significant energy and operational savings while going through Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. This is clearly an idea whose time has come. One begins to wonder if Greenbuild would be better named Greenbuilt – just a thought.

About Paul von Paumgartten
Senior Green Building Adviser, Johnson Controls, Inc.

As Senior Green Building Adviser for Johnson Controls, Paul von Paumgartten develops business opportunities while leveraging the company’s energy efficiency and environmental record. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and he is also Board President of the Energy Services Coalition. Through his efforts, he assisted Johnson Controls in earning the ENERGY STAR® 1999 Ally of the Year and 2001 Partner of the Year awards. With the USGBC, he is Co-chairman of the LEED–Steering Committee and the committee for developing LEED for Existing Buildings.

Previously, Mr. von Paumgartten served the Building Efficiency, as the National Manager, Lighting Services, and as Director of Performance Contracting. Before joining Johnson Controls, he was in management positions with McGraw Edison Company; and President of his own consulting firm, Productive Environments.

If you’ve thought about Retrogreening, or if you have already taken some steps to make your building more efficient you should be letting your stakeholders know. If you would like to know how, or if you simply want to learn more about HY-brid, send us a message, we would like to hear from you.

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In my last post, I wrote about sustainability and how it is being weaved into the moral fiber of business today. I also touched on the fact that companies may be addressing sustainability now if, for no other reason than to say they have a stance on the environment.

People close enough to the environmental movement within business know that’s not a very strong reason on its own. So for those who want to know more about the benefits of addressing sustainability, I thought I would ask someone who has been pioneering this area to explain it for us. Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Inc., and author of the new book, “Confessions of a Radical Industrialist” shared his thoughts with me recently and now you too can learn from Ray why a business should invest in sustainability—NOW.

Our conversation touches on everything from the path to sustainability for Interface, Inc., to what inspired Ray’s taking of the company down a sustainability path. Finally, Ray talks about the benefits of sustainability, the fact any business can and should do it and the importance of communicating sustainability efforts to internal and external audiences.

It enjoyed the opportunity to talk with one of the world’s most influential environmental business leaders and get his perspective on sustainability. Turns out he has the same outlook as HY-brid. I hope you enjoy listening to my conversation with Ray as much I did having it. Whether it’s your first steps, or if you have already begun down the path, I hope this Podcast inspires you to look more in-depth at what you are doing to address your sustainability efforts. As always, HY-brid would like to help you communicate those efforts. So give us call or send us an email, it’s why we’re here.

For more information on Ray, I encourage you to go to www.rayanderson.com.

Subscribe to our Podcast via RSS or download the interview (m4a file for iTunes users) or download the interview (mp3 file for non-iTunes users)or listen below.

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I was recently in Las Vegas. Even though it was technically vacation, I couldn’t help but view the city through my “green microscopic” goggles. As I walked from casino to casino in the city of excess, I noticed that there were no recycling bins. I was shocked!

However, when I returned home, I did my due diligence and researched recycling within the hospitality industry in Las Vegas and was surprised at what I found out.

According to the Nevada Environmental Protection Agency, the hotel recycling happens internally, behind the scenes without patrons even being aware. Many hospitality organizations are contracting with waste management companies to sort and recycle on a daily basis.

In my research, I also discovered that Planet Hollywood, located in the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace, has one of the most comprehensive restaurant recycling programs in Las Vegas. And it has been in place since 1994!

Planet Hollywood began recycling because food was over 84 percent of the its overall waste. To address the situation, management installed a separate garbage compactor on the restaurant’s receiving dock. The ability to separately control and monitor its own garbage has been integral to the success of Planet Hollywood’s recycling program.

After feeling better about recycling in the Las Vegas hospitality industry, I looked at the overall recycling of Las Vegas and according to a news report from Fox 5 Vegas on August 24, 2009, as a whole the city is ranked second to last.

However, looking at the glass half full and a 2008 study done by SustainLane, Las Vegas is ranked seventh in the nation for Energy and Climate Change policy. So clearly measures are being taken on behalf of the city and state of Nevada after all.

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It’s not always about how you market your business. It’s just as important to look at why you should be marketing it. And the issue of marketing your sustainability platform is a great example. Every organization is facing new energy challenges as the world shifts toward a more eco-conscious means of doing business, and the questions about your stance on the environment are being heard from all stakeholder levels. The increased political and societal pressure to curb carbon emissions and produce a meaningful message is inevitable. At this point, it would be detrimental for a company not to have a message created for how it plans to address the environment.

But how is the stance a business takes on the environment marketable? Should it be marketable? That depends on how it is approached. Never has there been more pressure for companies of all sizes to address sustainability. But doing so can’t happen without first understanding the “green” aspects of the business. A shotgun approach could lead to unnecessary expenditures and ultimately a “greenwashing” tag.

In previous posts and in those to follow, we have and will address how a business must look at what it has done to reduce its environmental impact. There are a number of ways organizations can collect that data- an energy audit is just one example. Once that information has been gathered, HY-brid works to help understand what makes sense from a communications standpoint for each of the stakeholders. The EcoMap (as we call it) process builds a message map for businesses to tie their environmental message into the overall corporate mission.

Once this map has been assembled, the sustainability message can be written. It is also at this point a company can determine exactly how much it wants to market what it has done. From the mapping process, a company can also learn how far it has to go to get to a sustainability message it wants to disseminate.

For more information on the EcoMap process, the questions to ask before you take your message to market or, if you simply want to learn more about HY-brid, send us a message, we would like to hear from you

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Cap and trade, energy efficiency, LEED buildings and renewable energy for business. All terms your audiences or customers are hearing and becoming very familiar with. With all the buzz around “green,” how you address your position on the environment is increasingly important. Your sustainability platform must project your environmental message across all audiences, internal and external. One segment taking increasing notice of green is the stakeholder- a somewhat loose term that envelops those from among others, the dealer/retailer audience to the supply chain, to those who own stock in a company.

A key reason for putting your sustainability platform in front of stakeholders is to keep them informed of how the company is addressing the rising number of environmental issues facing businesses of all types. With such a wide audience range, what makes sense from a sustainability perspective to one must also be pertinent to each of the others. That’s not to say that what you are saying to each gets communicated the same. What I do mean is that your platform remains the same but the terms and messages need to be communicated in a way that the audience sees the “what’s in it for me” has been met.

For instance, you may have three green certifications that make your product or service more sellable. To the dealer/retailer the certifications make sense in helping how they package that product and where in their store it is positioned. It also gives them an opportunity to promote their business as eco-friendly. That’s what’s in it for them.

To a stockholder, the fact you have three green certifications means something very different. An immediate question might be– are those labels going to help the price of the stock rise? The answer is maybe, but at the end of the day, what matters to this audience is a more global approach to your sustainability platform. The fact you have one may be enough to make them want to invest in you. If stock prices rise, that investor does better. That’s what’s in it for them.

Clearly there are many within your stakeholder audiences that are looking to work with and purchase stock in organizations with a solid environmental platform. This is another subset of your audience set and it too needs a message that makes sense. We will address this in a follow up post.

All of these examples are addressed in what HY-brid calls an EcoMap^sm. If you’ve been following me you know I have blogged about it before. It’s our way of helping clients understand how to put their environmental platform together—what audiences they have, what messages make sense to each of those audiences and how the platform ladders up to the overall corporate mission.

Have stakeholders asking what you are doing to address the environment? Have an environmental message and just don’t know how to put all the pieces together? The EcoMap is one way HY-brid can help. Questions on what your next steps are in navigating this issue? Let us know, it’s why we’re here.

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After my last blog titled One Green Message, Many Green Voices, I received a great comment from Keith P. His comment is:

Good starting points to take under consideration for establishing the green message within the proper conversations. The only thing I might challenge is how you reply within the social settings of facebook, twitter, tumblr, linkedin, myspace and brighkite when you are not the company spokesperson. Do you empower your employees to talk openly about how they view your green initiatives? Do you allow your employees to express their opinions and how they are helping the company be green? And do you engage people that discuss your company’s attempts at being green?

If the company has answered yes to this then you are a social business going green, if not your a company with a veil of secrecy of your green efforts and that is where you need help encouraging the conversation, because most likely you have bigger cultural issues.

Now if yes how can the EcoMap process help give the employees the framework of communication without sounding like they are talking points? How does the EcoMap process address when your Vendors and Consumers talk about your company? (Personal opinion on the last one–if you are embracing your Vendors and Consumers in a social context the conversation is more constructive, collborative, and innovative, which helps everyone in process make a difference.)

Looking forward to answers to these questions and follow-up blog posts on the process.

Thanks for the feedback Keith. HY-brid works with our clients to establish their environmental (green) platform and it’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach. To that end, it is much more than the green conversation(s) we address in our EcoMap process. We take into consideration such things as type of business, audience set(s), and messages that are not only pertinent to, but resonate with those audiences. This holistic approach to defining green for clients ladders up to the overall business goals and objectives and thus acts as an extension of the corporate mission.

In your comment you reference many of the social outlets being used today. We certainly address these in our communications planning, but it is again very different by client. One important thing to keep in mind is that not all businesses are marching to the same beat on social. We’ve found social marketing and social media are very new to a number of businesses, no matter their size and standing within their industry, and in fact we have visited with some very large corporations whose marketing teams are blocked from social sites. While we certainly encourage our clients to be as transparent as possible on their environmental stance, if they do not have the social tools in their arsenal (yet) we can only counsel them to use the tools they do have to promote their efforts.

But in our overall approach to social for those clients who have access to it, we look at it as a means of brand building. It is an extension of what can be done through traditional ads and PR but puts the brand building experience in the hands of the customer. That’s where being truly transparent plays a key role in how a business uses social in its integrated communications planning. The EcoMap process determines the audiences and messages for each, and from the Map, the tactics that make the most sense for those messages to be disseminated are determined. Social is a key ingredient in that tactical mix.

To answer your question about how we help manage messages when the people in the social space are not the spokespersons, we do give message points with hopes those socially communicating stay to them, but we also counsel our clients to develop social guidelines for employees to adhere to.

Thanks again for the great comment Keith.

Do you have questions about your environmental platform? Have comments on our process or HY-brid’s vision of green messaging and marketing? Let us know– it’s why we’re here.

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Welcome to HY-brid, Hoffman York’s new division dedicated to helping our clients launch their environmental and sustainability messaging. As an agency, we have been working with clients in the energy efficiency and sustainability marketing realm for nearly 10 years, but the concept of HY-brid started (in name at least) a few years back as we were helping some of our customers understand a few things about what they were doing as it pertained to “green” efforts in their offices and facilities.

What came of the work we did with those clients is what this website is all about. 


HY-bridgreen.com is an open means of communication, an information exchange about what we are doing to help our customers figure out what they are doing that is green, what they could be doing and ultimately how to communicate that to all levels of their end customers. It is also a way for you to tell us what you are doing that is green, what you would like to do and ultimately, a way to figure out if we need to work together to help you communicate your green message to your end customers.

That’s what we’re here for really — to guide our clients through the state of green and how it affects their business. Speaking of the state of green, I recently attended the State of Green Business Conference in San Francisco (Feb. 2, 2009). I heard a lot about what companies are doing to be green, a lot too was discussed about the way businesses would be working hard in 2009 to better their environmental impact (carbon footprint). One glaring miss though, from all that was discussed, was how these businesses were going to share what they had been doing or planned to do with the end customer. How you communicate what you are doing to better the environment—global and local, both in product and in process is an essential part of any marketing communications effort. At this point, even in this economy, it has to be.

To find out more about HY-brid, navigate the space you are in right now. See how we can help you figure out what your state of green is. We hope to work with you soon, and we hope to see you back here often. Have a question or comment? I encourage you to let us know what you think.

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According to Merriam-Webster Online, a hybrid can be a variety of things, including “a person whose background is a blend of two diverse cultures or traditions,” or “something (…a vehicle…) that has two different types of components performing essentially the same function.”

“hybrid.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009. Merriam-Webster Online. 24 February 2009
<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hybrid>

Based on that definition, what is HY-brid? 

It’s Hoffman York’s (HY) more than 75 years of traditional advertising experience blended with its growing, in-house expertise in green marketing and messaging. 

What does this mean for our clients? 

HY offers an extensive range of services, from public relations to media placement to research, in addition to a team of people—HY-brid—who understand the delicate and evolving nature of green messaging. 

What does this mean for Hoffman York? 

It’s a really exciting time. For years, we’ve been helping clients promote their environmental efforts. However, what we recently realized is that green isn’t a standard knowledge set at many other agencies. 

Ah-ha moment: Our green expertise is a unique strength. 

Now known as HY-brid, this green expertise is the foundation for a new category of services being offered to clients. Since we began communicating this expertise, the level of interest has been eye opening. Suddenly, our knowledge of green is a competitive advantage. 

Basically, we’ve done for our agency what we’re promising to help prospective clients do: Recognize the ways your organization is already green. Learn how to be greener. Communicate your honest, green efforts/strengths to internal and external audiences. Turn your environmental awareness into a competitive advantage. 

I guess you could say Hoffman York (HY) was the first, full-fledged HY-brid client.

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