Plant More Plants

This spring the Chesapeake Club is kicking off a campaign called “Plant More Plants.” They are airing TV ads in the Metro DC, Baltimore, Richmond, and Hampton Roads markets. They have produced two 30-second ads that encourage homeowners to aid the Chesapeake Bay by planting more plants, thereby reducing runoff.

Competition: “Yard of the month? Try yard of the century…”

War: Children wage war on runoff with a beautiful yard.

This is amazingly cool for the green industry. Someone has gone and done what we couldn’t do ourselves: made a major media campaign to promote plants. So who is the Chesapeake Club, why are they gifting us this free advertising, who’s paying for it and how can we take this and run with it?

The Chesapeake Club is a public-relations offshoot of the Chesapeake Bay Program, which is a “partnership of people and organizations, ranging from federal and state agencies to local governments to non-profits and academic institutions.” So, who is that, really? The key partners are government entities, including Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia and the EPA, as well as many cities and local governments.

The first media campaign by the Chesapeake Club aired in 2008-2010 with the tag-line: “Save the crabs, then eat them.” The purpose of the ads was to convince homeowners to skip application of fertilizers to their lawns in the spring.

“They should perish in some hot, tasty butter…”

When it comes to the “Plant More Plants” initiative, the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) is coordinating the campaign, which was funded by a $500,000 grant awarded in 2008 by the National Fish and Wildlife grant program.

Aren’t we fortunate they decided to make the center of their awareness campaign the need for increased use of our product instead of the negative aspects of keeping the grass green? The Virginia DCR deserves a thank-you note, but the “Plant More Plants” concept wasn’t the Chesapeake Club’s idea, or the EPAs or any of the partners of the Chesapeake Bay Program. Who do we have to thank?

According to Gary Waugh of the Virginia DCR, the ad agency BCF, of Virginia Beach, created the new strategy based on a very broad directive “to encourage personal stewardship to improve the environmental quality of the Chesapeake Bay.” They thought a positive message about plants might be  better than a negative message about fertilizer. So… thanks, BCF! You guys rock!

Garden Centers and Landscape companies can sign-up and be listed on the “Plant More Plants” website. Those who do will get to have access to marketing materials and may be able to use the “Plant More Plants” facebook page to promote their own “Bay-friendly” landscape practices. But as of this writing, only six garden centers and fifteen landscape companies are involved!

To sign-up, send Gary Waugh an e-mail.

How long will this campaign run? The Chesapeake Club has pretty much spent all of the grant money on producing the ads and buying air-time. As with the “fertilizer” campaign, they will conduct pre-and-post consumer awareness surveys. If the results do not show that the ads are effective, they will try a different approach in the future.

We don’t want that to happen! We as an industry really MUST get behind this and support it, promote it, and blow it up.

So, what do we do? How can we take this and run with it?