Thirty years in the making, the Ad Council and Keep America Beautiful are working together again, this time introducing a new advertising campaign aimed at boosting recycling.
Their watershed cooperation was one of the most memorable in the history of advertising. On Earth Day 1971, the second annual marking of the occasion, the two organizations introduced the "crying Indian" commercial which featured a Native American actor tearing up at the spectacle of pollution all around him as he paddled a canoe through polluted waters. The ad ran for 12 years and has been recognized as one of the century's top campaigns.
The effort added to memories of the two groups' first collaboration, which produced tag lines that are seared into the memories of American baby boomers and older generations. In 1960, a character named Susan Spotless appeared to promote anti-littering efforts with lines such as "Every litter bit hurts" and "Don't be a litterbug."
The new campaign, "I Want To Be Recycled," features trash including plastic bottles and aluminum cans that "aspire" to be more than they appear to be, ending up as plastic benches and as parts of big sports venues such as Baltimore's M&T Bank Stadium.
"When I grow up, I want to be a new pair of bluejeans," begins a radio spot with a child's voice, which then moves on to other "children" chiming in with things like "a kid's first computer" and "a glass countertop in a new home." It concludes with a child saying, "When I grow up, I don't want to be a piece of garbage. And if you recycle me, I won't be."
Not everyone is ready to call the new campaign an award-winner or even admit to liking it very much. Allen Hershkowitz, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the effort "very welcome" but questioned how effective it could be given that recycling programs mostly are underwritten by tight-budgeted municipal governments, according to The New York Times.
But one of the reasons that the "crying Indian" ad finally stopped running is that it helped prompt American consumers, governments and businesses to, in fact, stop polluting. In other words, it worked: Environmental vulnerabilities now are expressed mainly in terms of things like climate change and deforestation, not wanton spoilage of our surroundings.
And while recycling is one of those "green" objectives that isn't nearly as exciting to people as some others, maybe the new advertising campaign will be just as effective in its own way as the anti-pollution spot was more than 30 years ago.
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