This post goes out purposefully one day after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to honor the necessity for this man’s message to remain vital and ever present. We cannot contain the vast scope and importance of his work and its higher calling in a one day tribute, but rather should consider it a part of who we are each and every day.

The social aspects of sustainability are often overlooked, misunderstand, or misinterpreted. Recently at Compostmodern in San Francisco, some of the best and brightest designer minds were gathered to address the issues of sustainability as it relates to the design of our systems and society, but mostly the focus, feature, and understanding revolved around the environmental impact and considerations. And while respect for a clean and healthy living environment is critical in the big picture, even more important is our respect for others in the grand scheme of things. If in our pursuit of all things pro environment, we discover that we have lost our humanism, the trees have obscured our view of the forest, and we are in deep trouble. Understanding the quintessential nature of how our social systems interact with and complement our environmental ones is the key to understanding the true meaning of sustainability.

For today’s post we show a viral campaign we created about ten years ago in honor of the day and the mission of the man. Also included is the photograph that inspired the vision for the idea, which was to post these signs around Seattle above pairs of urinals, water fountains at airports, telephone booths and seats on buses.

The message below the words simply reads, “Thanks to Martin Luther King, Jr., signs like this don’t exist anymore. Remember him on January 18th.”

Perhaps it would have been better to say, January 18th, and beyond.

After a very energizing weekend with the folks at LinkTV in San Francisco, we stopped by Compostmodern 08 on the way to the airport to get wound up even a little more. It was a great line up for this event’s 4th year, where “brilliant ideas, practical solutions, drama, inspiration, eye candy and some tough questions” all converge in consideration of a transition to a sustainable society.

Our green guy emcee and man of many green properties Joel Makower kicked off the gathering with a framing of the green business timeline, and then handed the mike over to the always entertaining Alex Steffen from World Changing, whose powerful, pointed Powerpoint usually gets the crowd thoroughly roused. The day was filled with leading designers presenting case studies on their work in design toward a less unsustainable world. There was Mark Galbraith of cool green clothing company NAU, Jeff Walker of VSA Partners, who made a solid enough pitch of (his) work with GE on Ecomagination, Valerie Casey of IDEO, Jane Savage from Nike who we shared a panel with at Discover Brilliant in Seattle last year, and Scott Stowell of Open Studios whose work on Good magazine is better than good. Adam Werbach of Walmart “Personal Sustainability Project” fame keynoted out the affair to end on an upbeat we-can-do-it-one-small-step-at-a-time note (which ironically was quite the opposite message coming from Alex at the outset, who made it clear what he felt about individuals’ small efforts to address the planet’s problems).

Here’s to AIGA in the Bay Area for a very good event. Keep up the good work Phil, Gaby, Marc, and Jeff. And bring it to Seattle, please.

For this January 1st post, I’ll skip the conventional list of 2008 predictions and resolutions, except to say that I resolve to work less, eat better still, consume less, and exchange as much screen time for face time as possible. Oh, and be outdoors even more.

And my one big, hairy prediction for green and how it will be successfully marketed in the coming year is in the use of “citizen marketers”. Citizen marketers are customer evangelists—regular people–who extol the virtues of brands, products, services, and companies to their friends and peers online and offline. This form of peer-to-peer marketing is the perfect vehicle for green brands for a few reasons.

Citizen marketers are recruited and incentivized by companies to sell their products, and while one of the shortcomings for companies looking for citizen marketers of non-green products is that it is somewhat hard and costly to find reliable citizens to become shills, the green arena will prove to provide legions. One study in green-forward England showed that because of green peer pressure, people tell “little green lies” to overcome guilt and inaction. Green brands will find a surfeit of willing green evangelists to pitch their wares and in so doing pitch their own individual holier-than-thou brands in a show of conspicuous conservation.

Conversely, the recipient of the assurances given by the citizen marketer in pitching their favorite green brand, unlike the possibility of a skeptical or turned off friend for a non-green brand, is similarly positively inclined and more likely to listen and buy in. Green begets green as a powerful marketing tool.

Green brands benefit most from lack of spin (read: advertising as usual) and communicating an authentic and truthful message, and what better way to do that than through the bottom-up mechanism of word of mouth promotion? The new greenwear company Nau knew this coming out of the gate when it launched its company this year on the backs of its non-profit partners’ constituents and their green posses.

The highest level of code cracking by today’s marketing mavens involves some important themes, not the least of which is getting consumers involved with your brand, and even letting them shape it. In the realm of green branding, by using the green brandgelist, companies avoid accusations of greenwashing by effectively skipping any green claims that they would otherwise make in advertising and allowing their green brandgelists to do the heavy lifting.

Unilever’s ahead of the curve on this. Its “Go Green and Small With All,” uses in-classroom magazine and Web ads to recruit participants, targeting elementary school kids via a contest that looked for the greenest grade school in the country. Its ambassadors were encouraged to get their families to make small, green changes at home (like using concentrated All detergent) and to spread branded, eco-friendly messages. The ambassadors and their parents submitted report cards on their progress, and the school with the highest percentage of report cards (not yet announced) will receive a $50,000 grant for eco-friendly school improvements, a solar-powered iPod Shuffle MP3 player for every student, a one-year supply of All and an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in January. More than 3,000 elementary schools entered.

Using young students as ambassadors “reaches our target audience of mothers of school-age children,” says Helayna Minsk, marketing director for All. Incorporating it into a contest “encourages … word of mouth and got kids involved collectively,” she adds.

All of this doesn’t mean that there will necessarily be much of a reduction in the attempts to hit the green message home in traditional advertising. In fact, we’ll see a lot more of this. But traditional advertising will only be marginally effective in connecting with consumers, mainly because few agencies know how to create advertising for green or socially responsible brands that actually works. Case in point this year is the Chevy campaign “Gas Friendly to Gas Free” that began to position Chevy and GM as a green car maker. Desperate times require desperate measures, and Chevy is in line for one of the more grandiose greenwashing awards of 2007 with the public’s reaction of utter confusion over ads for cars not for sale, giant hybrids and vegetarian cars. To think that all of those years of building a brand around patriotism and durability could somehow be sidestepped to capture the new green consumer is an embarrassment to the advertising industry. (Maybe the next TV spot in line should show nature imagery in the vein of Infinity’s seminal ad campaign from 1989 of “rocks and trees” to redefine the tagline, Like a Rock. And instead of Bob Seger, they use Bob Dylan.)

The fun will come in effectively integrating the messages and the vehicles across media, which increasingly means letting go and allowing the consumer to influence the brand.