Arthur Solomon, Public Relations Consultant

Earth Day will be celebrated on Wednesday, April 22. As usual, it will be forgotten the next day, or to be charitable two days later, or to be extremely charitable three days later.

What I learned at my first PR job at a political agency is that long-term publicity or corporate messaging programs work. Many short term programs don’t work. They only help the bottom line of PR agencies. And that’s the problem with Earth Day publicity – short term is the norm term.

It has always baffled me why it should be so. It would be so easy to create a long-term program promoting Earth Day at a minimal cost. The Earth Day message certainly should be remembered for more than a few days a year.

If I was assigned to create a publicity program for Earth Day, here’s what I would do:

1. I would work with an advertising agency to prepare two Public Service Announcements, one for TV, the other for radio. They would be scheduled to run a month before Earth Day. The PSA could easily be translated to foreign languages and sent to cooperating international PR agencies to be distributed by their offices in their countries.

2. Show biz folk are always looking for causes to support. It would be easy to assemble a number of them to tape video messages about why they support Earth Day, especially if they have a new project to promote that could be worked into the script. For those without a new project it would provide the opportunity to keep them in front of the public. They would be produced in a news story format so they would easily fit into hard news TV programs or the audio into radio news programs. Athletes would be used for talk sport radio programs.  Live interviews could be arranged for those agreeing to do so.

3. Earth Day is a natural for stunts. Working with community groups, cleaning up the beaches, showing trash pulled from rivers and the oceans could be an Earth Day happening that TV would cover.

4. A checklist of how people can help make Earth Day an everyday occurrence can easily be prepared and sent to national and local news outlets and print pubs.

A key element of the program would be to form an “Everyday is Earth Day, Save Our Planet” committee. It would consist of leading corporate executives.

They would be asked, and I’m sure more than a few would agree, to have their PR and advertising agencies prepare and execute “Everyday is Earth Day, Save Our Planet” PSA and publicity programs to be executed throughout the year, thus turning Earth Day into a long term promotion. Some PR agencies and advertising agencies now do pro bono work. Certainly if a major client would request them to do so they would cooperate.

There could also be a payoff for the committee members. On the days leading up to Earth Day, their PR departments or agencies could arrange TV, radio or print interviews about the importance of making every day Earth Day. Business TV programs and publications, looking for “good feel” stories would also be an easy target.

About the Author: Arthur Solomon, a former journalist, was a senior VP/senior counselor at Burson-Marsteller, and was responsible for restructuring, managing and playing key roles in some of the most significant national and international sports and non-sports programs. He also traveled internationally as a media adviser to high-ranking government officials. He now is a frequent contributor to public relations publications, consults on public relations projects and is on the Seoul Peace Prize nominating committee. He can be reached at arthursolomon4pr (at) juno.com or artsolomon4pr@optimum.net.