Where n = Greed divided by Green

Let’s pull back from the dead tree of sloppy images that end up being jammed in my mailbox by a postie who’s in a bind to get back to his avatar flings in Second Life. I’m referring here to the type of fishing net marketing campaigns where legions of healthy trees are felled just to print high gloss images of ultra-swank condos, or other things I cannot afford, or afford to be consumables in my life. This practice, this misguided and ill-informed practice – junk mail – in the literal sense, is considered a form of traditional advertising and awarded all the trappings of legitimacy.

The tree-killer advertising game is hopefully someday going to reach a breaking point. Firstly, it doesn’t really work – but, oh, somebody bought that thing in the flyer this week. Ok, it does work, but only if the cost of blanket coverage is covered by the return sales. I was watching a documentary the other day on the disappearance of the Maya, not the Leonard Nimoy coffee-table book stuff, but a real documentary, and I found myself amazed that such a sophisticated society could be brought to its knees in part by their practice of limestoning the outer surfaces of their temples – a practice that required the culling of forests to produce large quantities of limestone – and yet, they didn’t stop applying limestone on their temples until it was already too late. And every time I see junk mail in my mailbox, I see us walking the dark road to Tikal.

Is this not supposed to be the age of efficiency? Is this not supposed to be the age of clean burning enlightenment? SEO and Search Engine Marketing offer paperless, targeted forms of advertising where it is not just about traffic flow, it’s all about carbonless conversion to sales. The other efficient by-product of online marketing is that you can track your status, your conversion rates – your efforts can become tangible numbers to help you streamline or tweak your targets. This tangible efficiency is a cornerstone of the new economy and it has arrived as sure as reason and logic have returned to the white house. A friend of mine who is heavy in the SEO world told me recently that he thought that if this current economic downturn had happened even two years ago that it would have been touch and go for Internet marketing at that time because the big names, the all-seeing corporations, had not embraced SEO as a player in the promotional game. But let’s turn some tables. This age of efficiency should prove to be the deathnail in wasteful advertising efforts like random mail-outs, if for no other reason than SEO marketing has the numbers, and the numbers are painted green.

For more on greening your business, please visit the David Suzuki Foundation. For more on online marketing, please visit the Online Marketing Blog.