A New Way to PSA

Originally published February 18, 2009

Since I’ve been attending Dickinson College, the green devil has been our mascot for sustainability. For those of you reading this outside of Dickinson College, the green devil is basically a cartoon or a person in a costume who speaks on behalf of the sustainability initiative office. He’s basically a manipulation of our normal mascot, the red devil, who is much less vocal about everything because he is almost non-existent. Every now and then we get e-mails from the sustainability office that are signed by the green devil. His picture can be seen all over campus and he is the most visual symbol for our college’s sustainability program. Most of us are used to this, but recently I’ve begun to question the green devil’s adequacy.

My doubts first arose when I told several non-Dickinson students about the green devil and every single one of them laughed in my face. I guess that at the college level it’s pretty ridiculous to have a cartoon to persuade us to be more civic minded. That should probably stop at around the beginning of 7^th grade. Although I have at times been critical of the methods which sustainability is being promoted, I absolutely support sustainability and understand that it must be promoted. But being told to conserve electricity by such a puerile symbol is kind of patronizing. The green devil clearly does not respect my intelligence. However, sustainability must continue to be promoted. So how can we promote sustainability without childish mascots?

The first thing we can do is look at advertising strategy. Believe it or not, the use of a character like the green devil used to be very common in advertisements. Cartoon characters like Joe Camel and the Frito Bandito spoke to young consumers in order to get them to buy something unhealthy. This tactic is beginning to be frowned upon because it manipulated children’s inherent lack of common sense. The green devil could be just as bad as any of those mascots, except he stands for a noble cause. But that also makes him much less cool and therefore much less influential. There is another advertising strategy that works especially well, using sexual imagery.

The term sex sells needs to be applied to our sustainability campaign. I can’t promise that hot women promoting sustainability will work, but I can promise you it will grab everyone’s attention. Just look at those commercials for Axe body spray. People don’t buy it because it smells good. It smells like vinegar mixed with cinnamon. People buy it because of the commercials that insinuate that if you wear this body spray you will get laid by hot women. Right now environmental movements are severely lacking sexy spokespeople. Al Gore is not going to cut it. We need to show someone recycling and then sexy women congregate around him. I’ll admit this is less dignified than the green devil. In fact it may also be more insulting to our intelligence, but let’s face facts, sustainability doesn’t sell itself. We all are going to have to be willing to make sacrifices if we’re going to save the planet. Some may be offended if sex is used to promote sustainability, but how else are we going to convince people to conserve energy? The only other way that is equally effective is scaring the crap out of people to get them on your side, and let’s not forget how the Bush administration screwed things up doing that.