Maikel van de Mortel’s from the Netherlands; Björgvin Sævarsson’s from Iceland. Both grew up in small towns where recycling and otherwise minimizing one’s environmental footprint wasn’t considered especially “green”—it was (and is) simply what you do, how you live. As Maikel says, “coming from small countries, we learned how to be creative and mindful about how to use what resources we had.”
Both settled in the Twin Cities in the late 1990s. Both started their own marketing businesses. About a year ago, they got together and founded Element Six Media, which uses natural materials to create marketing messages. And they’re both funny—they play off each other almost like a comedy team.
But they’re (playfully) serious about their work. They’re green marketers—practical visionaries who are very thoughtful about the future of marketing and the future of business. Though many U.S. companies have sought to wrap themselves in the green mantle of “sustainability,” for many others, green still has a “treehugger stigma,” Maikel says. “We want to make this mainstream.”
Locally, Element Six may be best known, at least in the marketing community, for the snow imprints it made throughout downtown Minneapolis to promote Fresh Energy, a St. Paul-based nonprofit advocating for the use of cleaner and more efficient energy. It also created ads for the St. Paul office of telecom provider Boost Mobile. Element Six uses nontoxic media formulated to its own specifications: The Boost Mobile “posters” wash away in the rain, without putting pollutants into the wastewater stream.
Element Six also has used sand and moss to create highly distinctive marketing campaigns. (Question: Can you guys do QR codes in moss? The answer: Yes.)
Element Six’s office is the coffeehouse inside the Open Book center on South Washington Avenue. (They make sure they buy coffee and baked goods there as a kind of “rent” payment on the Wi-Fi and other amenities. Björgvin calls it the “recycling of space.”)
Though a start-up, Element Six hears from numerous green advocates and businesses cheering on its work and ideas. “There are all of the ingredients of a movement,” Björgvin says.
But how big a movement? The Element Six fellas acknowledge that it’s still small. In terms of green consciousness, businesses are behind their (potential) customers. That becomes clear each time they make a pitch to an established American company.
While Element Six has been able to keep busy, most of its projects have been done in Europe, where it has sent its Minnesota “green team” of freelance designers. Most of the companies here in the U.S. that they’ve talked to are often intrigued, but almost always mystified.
”Companies are used to working with the toolbox they already have,” Björgvin notes. “It's hard to get them out of their comfort zone.”
“It’s a different way of thinking,” Maikel adds. “The more unfamiliar people are with something, the more ROI they want.”
They want to see the usual numbers. Element Six can provide metrics. But those metrics are based on the notion of the triple bottom line. Here, a campaign’s success is measured not only by exposure and ROI, but also how it improves the community, and even the planet. Using green materials like plants can even have a positive effect on the local ecology.
To the Element Six guys, these ideas aren't pie-in-the-sky. They’re good business—future-oriented business. They’re a way to build a community around your brand; transactions will follow from that.
Fun can also follow function. Björgvin and Maikel cite the thinking of Minneapolis designer, architect, and “Metro Hippie” Joshua Foss who advocates “thrivability,” a design and lifestyle philosophy intended to be more inspiring than “sustainability,” which to many of us can sound rather joyless and limiting: like homework, or your least favorite vegetable. Green can be pleasurable as well as a “good thing.” An ad made of moss can be a joy to the senses as well as a positive, highly targeted branding tool.
Still, Björgvin and Maikel are spending more time than they’d like in advocacy, education, and evangelization, at least in the U.S. But they’re not preaching. Not doing green marketing yet? No worries. “We forgive you because you didn’t know about any alternative” to non-biodegradable marketing messages, Björgvin says, half-jokingly. “But now there is an alternative.”
“We don’t judge anybody,” Maikel says. “Unless you’re a chemical company. Then there’s no saving you, and God be with you.”
Here’s what I think it comes down to: What kind of economy, what kind of communities, what kind of world, will we build from the ashes of the Great Recession? That’s one of the big questions Element Six is asking. And there’s no good reason why green marketing can’t help answer it.
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