Happy Earth Day!

Salazar Packaging, a client heavily focused on sustainable packaging, is always looking for ways to get their Earth-friendly message out and stimulate conversation about packaging and the environment. Easier said than done! Although packaging is a mature industry, sustainable packaging is a hot topic generating buzz in a hundred directions on any given day.

So company president Dennis Salazar and I, with help from my ultra-talented illustrator, Mark Hill, decided to co-author a comic strip and see if we could interest anyone in publishing it. The result was Eco Ed™, the guy next door who wants to do the right thing for the environment but always seems to come up short.

Lo and behold, Eco Ed™ is now appearing as a regular feature in one of the industry’s finest and most widely read print publications, Packaging World. Here is the first cartoon, which appears in the April edition.

(reprinted with permission from packworld.com)

Packaging World is loaded with news and detailed information on every aspect of packaging. It’s read by industry executives, managers, engineers, marketers, designers, salespeople — pretty much everybody. Their packworld.com Web site is, for my money, the best in the business.

The cartoon is already generating conversation and helps reinforce the connection between Salazar Packaging and “going green”. The client has used cartoons this way in other market segments for some time, always with the same results: more conversation leading to more inquiries leading to more sales. (The publisher sees plenty of value in cartoons as well — more on that in an upcoming post.)

Comic strips, in the traditional sense, are a vanishing breed, because the newspapers that print them are themselves vanishing. But for business use, whether B2B or B2C, I’m convinced cartooning is gold waiting to be mined. Every industry, no matter how staid, pumps out newsletters, magazines, trade journals, convention bulletins, blogs — on and on, online and off. In every case, there’s always a shortage of one thing.

Content.

Publications need content that grabs, content that sticks, content that engages, content that gets people talking, content that makes readers come back. That’s what cartoons do. That’s why newspapers love them, and that’s why marketers should love them, too. If you want to get people talking, add a cartoon to the case study you’re writing for the trade journal. Or the white paper you’re pulling together for an industry study. The cartoon may be trivial compared to the substance of that case study or white paper, but remember this.

The New Yorker contains some of the deepest, most skillfully composed content in the English language. But everybody talks about the cartoons.