Art & Commerce: Inconvenient Truths

NEW YORK Timberland invents a “nutritional label” for its boots—which includes data on the energy consumed in the boots’ production—and then generates 1,623,697 pieces of color-printed paper in just one run of its ad in The New York Times Magazine announcing that fact. Patagonia pledges 1 percent of its sales to preserving the natural environment, and yet prints over 20 million catalogues a year to do so.

Obviously, there’s waste in marketing. And we often expect consumers to dispose of things they have and replace them with what we’re marketing.

Nevertheless, it’s grossly negligent in this day and age to create tons of solid waste in the form of fliers, postcards, cup holders and the gamut of “nontraditional” garbage in order to forge brand connections.