ENVIRONMENTALISM  (CONT)

Few companies will divulge the sums that they are devoting to green advertising, but they seem to be sizable. Since May, for example, GE has run two prime-time Ecomagination campaigns, several print campaigns, and continues to rotate four commercials on CNBC, its own cable channel. The Ecomagination ads are part of GE's "Imagination at Work" campaign, and next month they will probably go on hiatus while GE focuses advertising on its health care innovations. But new Ecomagination ads are already in the works.

"We are delivering a new message with Ecomagination, so we are putting a significant budget around it," said Judy L. Hu, global executive director of advertising and branding.

Even companies that normally shun self-laudatory environmental campaigns are making exceptions these days.

Goldman Sachs has never advertised its investment in wind farms or its involvement in the carbon emissions trading market. Nor does it plan to advertise the firmwide environmental policy it adopted in December. "Clients don't come to us because we have an environmental policy," said Lucas van Praag, managing director in charge of global communications.

Still, this year Goldman ran $600,000 worth of newspaper ads, created by Ogilvy & Mather, promoting a gift of land it made in Chile's part of Tierra del Fuego, in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society. "We were proud enough to have done it that we just wanted it known more broadly," Mr. van Praag said.

Alcan, the giant Canadian aluminum company, has also been breaking with its usual stay-mum tradition. "If we spend $400,000 in total on advertising in a year, that's a lot," said Daniel Gagnier, senior vice president for corporate and external affairs.

Nonetheless, Alcan in the last few months has run ads in The Globe and Mail in Toronto showcasing its efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. It has also run ads in environmental publications seeking applicants for the $1 million Prize for Sustainability it began awarding last year (the first one went to the Forest Stewardship Council). Ads in Quebec newspapers noted that it had planted 100,000 trees in that province - to offset the additional greenhouse gas emissions that it thinks inevitably resulted when 10,000 people converged on Montreal this month for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change.

Mr. Gagnier does not pretend that the ads, all of them created by CGCom in Montreal, will help Alcan sell more aluminum. His primary audience was internal. "Every time we survey our 70,000 employees, we hear that they want to be proud of our environmental leadership," he said. "Outsiders may not remember the Alcan ads a few months down the road, but our employees will remember them with pride."

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89 Nations
& 8 states
have banned
leghold traps.