Mozilla Firefox is going organic, Asus are making bamboo computers, Chevron is becoming the new Greenpeace. In my days in advertising, countless man hours were spent mulling over the perfect green pantone at the bequest of stressed out corporate executives.

They’d spend small fortunes sending our work back and forth, re-shading their logos, desperate to capture that quintessential perfect green goodness – it’s too earthy, no, now it’s too bright, can’t we make it paler without being too soft?

Now greenness is in the hands of specialist PR consultancies and the true spin has really started taking shape. Comfy feely advertising (Chevron being perhaps the most recent culprit) now embellish our screens, lovingly symbolizing the beauty of humanity, embodying the spirit of our collective conscience – cue planet earth, cue little girl holding hands with daddy, cue forest, edit out villagers slaughtered by troops on Chevron’s payroll to intimidate local populations in Nigeria (upset that their drinking water is now a refinery’s sludge dump).

Chevron’s Story:

The Stories they don’t talk about:

If there’s one thing I have learned in advertising, symbolism is one of the most effective tools to master. Get this right and corporations will throw money at you like confetti and an illustrious career as a creative director is guaranteed.

I admire the Chevron adverts for their sheer beauty, thousands of man hours were lovingly spent on each and every one of them.
But like other religions at their conception, this one is starting to get out of hand as organizations jostle for position at the right hand of their new green deity.

I don’t want to get too cynical about green issues but it’s getting harder these days to see the wood from the flees. Environmentalism has it’s place in corporate America and the more they realize there’s a buck to be made, the more green they’ll become. This is all good.

But like the Catholic Church in the middle ages, who spent more embellishing fine cathedrals than doing the good that they preached, much more is being spent today embellishing the images of corporations than actually doing good for the planet. Is greenness following a religious path? Well, the unifying symbolism has already emerged… hallelujah.