Green Ideas That Make Business Sense

Every once in a while you come across a company that is shifting their brand in very real ways. It's often the simplest things that make the biggest difference in how a company and a brand is perceived. It's what I call taking the brand off the drawing board and bringing it to life.

For all those people who look at outdoor advertising as a blight on America, I ask you to check out what Fuel Outdoor in Miami has done. It's created a deal with the city of Miami to build 600 solar powered bus shelters. Yes, it gets to sell the advertising space on these locations, but hey, that's 600 bus shelters for people to hide from the sun and rain. Better still, they're solar powered, so the cost of keeping them lit at night is nothing.

So who says creating a green initiative has to cost? Who says it has to be painful for the company? It can be a win for the company [Fuel gets more ad space to sell], a win for the community [Miami gets 600 bus shelters for free], and for the planet [solar, solar, solar which will prevent an estimated 2 tons of carbon emissions from being expelled into the air].

Miami Mayor Manny Diaz explained, “Thanks to a successful public-private partnership, what we have with Fuel Miami is a revolutionary model at work – corporate advertising dollars are being used to clean the environment.”

“As outdoor advertisers, we are sensitive to the quality and appearance of the city’s environment,” Freedman said. “In the case of our Miami bus shelters, we felt it was necessary to ensure that our advertisements could provide benefits to not only our clients, but also the city.”

Not a bad thing for everyone involved....