It's intrusive and it clutters your mailbox. It kills nearly 100 million trees annually and produces as much CO2 as 3.7 million cars, according to ForestEthics. If the environmental nonprofit has its way, junk mail will nearly go extinct.

And then it hit me," editor-in-chief Deborah Needleman prefaces her eco-epiphany in March's issue of domino. "It's not domino's job to tell you how to lobby Congress for more efficient fuels or send reporters to investigate 'corporate greenwashing' or even try to convince you to move your entire family into a solar-powered yurt." Indeed.

When it comes to crimes against the environment, few would place the magazine industry among the worst offenders. But this is 2008, when even the pettiest eco-criminal can score points for engaging in a little rehab - especially if it fits your brand profile.

Is offsetting your carbon footprint a useful contribution to our eco-system or just another futile exercise in pretending to be doing good by throwing money at a problem? You have your News Corps and Yahoos tripping over themselves to buy their carbon-offset credits like Catholic adulterers buying indulgences. While these companies are vocal about their eco-initiatives, they are very hesitant to point out what they are actually doing to reduce their huge footprints.

Patti Adcroft, editorial director of Discover magazine, might wear a size-9½ shoe, but she has the smallest CO2 footprint in her office. As part of their "Better Planet Solutions" special issue this month, the editors looked at their mag's impact on climate change and their own personal emissions. Internally, 20 staffers went head-to-head to find out who was master of their domain. Adcroft says the inter-office competition got much more heated than she'd expected.

You've probably seen the animated video from Avenue A | Razorfish bemoaning the plight of the endangered "Wild Snowman." The brief clip is presented as a tongue-in-cheek nature PSA. Why an interactive advertising shop had created and distributed the video, however, was anyone's guess.

Few marketing theories have enjoyed such long-lived consensus as the existence of "opinion leaders." Since the glorious days of radio, marketers have gone to great lengths to reach a small number of these disproportionately influential people in the hope that they'll actively absorb and interpret their media messages for the lower-end media users.

Nobody is a stranger to words like "buzz" and "viral" anymore - media guys, ad guys and digital experience guys are all thinking about how to get people talking with their ideas, but PR is where it all started: That's their stock-in-trade.

If you are like many other marketers and media planners, you're probably struggling to make behavioral targeting work. Behavioral targeting confuses people. The term encompasses a wide range of tactics and methodologies and is further obfuscated by new media networks trying to differentiate themselves by claiming the latest and greatest approach.

Once again, media are in one of those strange positions where they must report on the possibility of an economic downturn - perhaps even abetting its occurrence as a result - while knowing that such news can only hurt them.