• NY Times, Thursday, December 22, 2005 11:45 AM

A growing number of major marketers are spending increasing amounts of their advertising budgets to promote environmental issues. The goal, of course, is to be viewed as a company that takes environmentalism seriously in order to reap the potential benefits that come with being "green." The list of marketers embarking on this strategy is a long one and includes General Electric, BP (formerly British Petroleum), Ford Motor Co., and even Exxon Mobil, which has made environmental issues the cornerstone of the "advertorial" columns it pays to run on newspaper op-ed pages even though it is still plagued by references to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska waters in 1989. Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a nonprofit group, said, "It seems that major corporations have finally decided that environmental consciousness is an important part of building their image and their brand." Environmentalists, however, offer mixed, sometimes highly skeptical, views on whether the strategy is working.

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