Greenvertising

Good advertising is the right mix of timely insight and creative thinking. This hit me immediately when I arrived in the San Francisco financial district via BART last week. AMD had taken over ALL of Montgomery station with a single campaign for Opteron chips. Posters with witty power- and heat-saving slogans covered the walls; each had a snappy, "green" brag, such as:

Stick 'em in your data center. And stick it to the power company.
Is green. Saves green.
Scorching fast servers. Without the scorching part.
Cooler heads have prevailed.

Pictures here.

Power, space and cooling are big, pressing issues in today's data centers. There is a reason that Google is building a data center on the Columbia river in Oregon...cheap power! The site was formerly an aluminum plant that also made use of inexpensive electricity.

So it dawned on me that AMD is the latest Fortune 100 company to jump on what I'm coining the Greenvertising movement.

In addition to the BART campaign, AMD has identical marquee-style billboards in New York's Times Square and on highway 101 heading to Silicon Valley, each counting up the "Estimated cost of energy spent worldwide by not using AMD-based servers." It clocks about $24 a second. Business Week has a background piece on the campaign, and the calculation. See www.amd.com/power for their view.

Looking further, I realized how big Greenvertising is in the data center. Sun proclaims that a Sun Fire server with CoolThreads technology "Sips Power, Gulps Data." Rackable is also promoting critical messages of power savings, an area where they excel. These companies and others have formed The Green Grid, a multi-vendor initiative to reduce power consumption in data centers.

Taking another step back, I see Greenvertising everywhere. It represents the recognition by global corporations that issues about the environment, sustainability, and renewable resources resonate with their customers. Loud and clear. Ask Al Gore about that.

So I began to compile a short list of the greater good:

GE
Ecomagination (most soothing music in case you are having a bad day at the office)

Honda
Environmentology

Toyota
Hybrid Synergy Drive (best overall multimedia experience...download commercials to your iPod)

General Motors
LiveGreenGoYellow (best music)

BP
Beyond Petroleum

I put these links on a group-editable website. Feel free post your finds, photos, and more.

And stay tuned for more on the issues of power, space, heat, and cooling in the data center.