NBC's Green Week: Green is the Color of Cash

NBC Universal just finished up "Green Week," where seven days have been given over to the celebration of all things environmental, both on NBC's network and cable channels and throughout all of its properties including Universal Studios and iVillage. This masterstroke of marketing by NBC is designed to brand the network as the "Environmental Network," which will directly benefit the bottom line in three ways. The first and primary achievement of this programming is to increase market share. Recent market research by the Norman Lear Center and pollster John Zogby has indicated three broad groups of media consumers-the red, the blue, and the purple. FOX and FOX news have deliberately gone after the red group, 37% of media consumers. All the other networks have been going after the purples, the 24% of viewers who will watch anything. But the largest group, the 39% who identify as liberal are not directly being served by any of the major networks. Their favorite network is NBC, and finally using this leverage for NBC's tactical advantage by playing to its base is a market savvy move on NBC's part. The one thing liberals can all agree on is the primary importance of global warming awareness, so Green Week brands NBC as theirs.

Green Week is all about global warming "awareness," and not actually about fighting global warming, an important distinction. This is good news for large corporate advertisers, many of whom have been taking a beating lately in the blogosphere over their anti-environmental corporate policies. Not only can corporations advertise with "environmental" ad spots on NBC, by simply advertising on NBC they will partake of the network's green cachet. This will increase corporate goodwill at no cost, and even improve the effectiveness of their advertising, as the viewership of NBC is pro-environmental.