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Today, PRWeek is hosting the “Target Green” Conference in San Francisco (supported by a blog written by PRWeek’s prolific Keith O’Brien). 

I hear it’s booked solid.  That’s cool.  Honestly, we ought to save the planet.  I am all for that.  We have a “green” client here at SHIFT that we are really excited about.  We hope to gain more traction in this arena.

And so does everybody else.  Which has me worried.

The hubbub amongst my PR peers re: “green opportunities” (i.e., this is a hot new sector: there are sure to be opportunities to “do well while doing good!”) is, I fear, a li’l misplaced.

The Green Industry will likely not be a wellspring of lucrative opportunities for the PR industry. 

I hope I am wrong – both because I like to see the PR industry do well, and because it benefits us all if the Green Movement is hardy, viable, thriving.  Meanwhile, tech-oriented agencies are well qualified to handle this sort of work, given our penchant for translating tech-talk into layman terms & for our embrace of grassroots tactics. 

But, these types of firms are accustomed to clients who typically want to influence either GLOBAL 2000 buyers or broad swaths of consumers – both of which can be reached via “known” channels (InformationWeek, USA TODAY, broadcast outlets, select blogs), and both of which tend to decide quickly on winners/losers.  It is relatively easy to gain traction, if your product & story are really good.

Contrariwise, in the Green field, the products tend to be highly expensive, experimental, and subject to a lot of regulation.  Also, the buyers are more often metropolitan districts (read: slow-to-move), vs. corporations/consumers.

As turned out to be the case in Biotech and Nanotech (boomlets in their own right, during the late ‘90s and early 00’s) – which faced similar hurdles – I think we’ll ultimately see a handful of big winners, but also find that most PR pros are catering to a host of niche players.

The good news is that whatever contribution PR can make will truly help make this a better, safer, cleaner, sustainable world.  I am sure that many PR folks would rather do the virtual spadework now – even with little hope for a rising financial tide – if we can help the planet avoid the kind of real-world spadework that would come with the rising tides of climate change.