FTC Green Guidelines May Leave Marketers Red-Faced – Advertising Age – News.

Ad Age is reporting that new FTC green Guides are coming, and coming soon. While this is yet to be confirmed from the FTC, it brings to light some important issues:

• Firstly, the US Government is not first to do this. Canada, UK and Australia have all recently updated their own green marketing guides, and are worth taking a look at. Pretty sure that FTC did.
• Will it really make the 300 different seals invalid? We are not convinced. Firstly, there are not 300 seals in the US, unless you are defining it REALLY broadly, like every kind of tick and leaf you see on a package. Secondly, to do so, FTC will have to take a stand on what is a credible ecolabel – a topic for which there is little current consensus.
• Substantiation appears to be the key. Want to make a claim that a gizmo is green, greener, green-est? At the least, make sure you can back it up.
• It’s not only the guides themselves, but also how they are enforced that is at issue. Wonder what is their budget.

A good outcome will be if some of those with dodgy green claims are given pause by this news. A less good outcome is if it stalls the growth of the green economy for legal-department fear of being caught saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, in the wrong place.

Defining what is good is really hard. Defining what is “better” slightly easier, but still tricky. And making that into a simple label that clearly says to people “this is good, buy this” is also harder than it seems, as label-geeks well know.

Today we hear that the Smart Choices program has been scaled back in response to mounting criticism. What lessons can be gleaned for eco-labels and green claims?

The Smart Choices program had set criteria for foods in 19 categories, including cheeses; snack foods and sweets; breakfast cereals; fats, oils and spreads; meals and entrees. Automatically qualifying are fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables without additives. Then, within each category the label indicates products that have met the criteria of being more “healthful”, based on: limiting substances  (including fats, sugars and sodium); nutrients to encourage (such as calcium, fiber and some vitamins and minerals); and food groups to encourage (fruits and vegetables, whole grains and low- or nonfat dairy).

Sounds pretty logical. The problem, it seems, is that the limits set were just not strict enough and did not match broader conceptions of “healthful”. So that the now classic example of fruit-loops qualifying for the Smart Choices label simply did not pass the sniff (or laugh) test and subsequently raised the ire of harder core nutritionists and the skeptical eye of various government officials.

There are some analogies we can draw here between “healthful” and “nutritional” and “green” and “eco-friendly”. These are hard concepts to pin down, subject to a range of opinions, science that changes over time, and depend very much on what you are comparing yourself to.

So for those into green or eco- labels, the first lesson is one of choosing the right categories and benchmark groups. So Fruit Loops might be better nutritionally than doughnuts for breakfast, but compared to my home-made museli? Not so much.

Secondly, setting limits within those bounds needs to be carefully considered, tested and measured.

The debate over Smart Foods also reminds me of discussions over clean coal. Yes its cleaner-coal (compared to regular coal delivering electrical power), but is it really clean? Well, perhaps not compared to wind power or other renewable energy resources.

How boring I am becoming: categories matter and so do benchmarks. Much more fun to think about scandals involving fruit loops, cocoa pops, cakes, pastries etc. Afternoon tea break time clearly!

Interested to hear people’s perspectives on what is going on with Smart Choices.