Meet Bruce
Bruce is the CEO and founder of BKM Marketing a Boston-based integrated marketing agency focused on helping clients grow their businesses. BKM marketing creates about 100 campaigns a year for clients, typically producing millions of direct mail pieces, online display ads, emails, social, social media posts, and more. But he’s not here to talk about that today. Two years ago, Bruce became interested in understanding how his firm contributed to global warming. So he engaged a class of MBA students to measure his firm’s carbon footprint and examine the marketing industry’s carbon impact as a whole.
What prompted you to spend so much of your time and energy on climate change?
Well, you know, it’s really interesting. First and foremost, I live in the Washington area, and we have an ocean nearby. And everyone’s concerned about how you know how high those oceans going to get. And, you know, when you start looking inwardly, it’s, why is there so much concern about climate change right now, and it’s because of human activity. So I own a small business, and we do a lot of stuff that might be part of the problem. So I wanted to take a good close look at what it is my company does, how what kind of impact that has, and also the industry. And it was enlightening to see how much damage we are doing as and not just our industry, lots of industries are like this. And so we wanted to measure it and see what we could do to offset what we’re doing and reduce what we’re doing. And believe it or not, that helps me make sleep a little bit better at night. And we were very lucky to find out that we can offset not only our impact but all the client work that we do. And so far, it’s been very well received. And one of the things that we get asked some follow-up to is that all the time is okay, do business customers care about whether or not the companies that are doing business with actually really care if the company cares about the environment? And the answer is overwhelming. Lots of different studies on this. Probably the most interesting fact is that 92% of customers are more likely to trust a company that supports any kind of social or environmental issue. That’s nine out of 10. When you look at millennials 68% of millennials buy a product with a social environmental benefit. More often than not, they seek it out It’s whole, it’s really good business, in addition to good for the environment.
So how can our listeners go about making their businesses net zero now?
Well, there are several ways to go about it, the first thing you have to do is learn what is your carbon footprint, and it varies from business to business, of course, and industry to industry. So one of the things we ended up learning is how little knowledge there is about US-based businesses, and what the impact they make on the environment is to do a whole lot of research. And most of that research will point you to a bunch of resources coming out of Europe, Europe is certainly I don’t know how many years but a half a decade, decade ahead of the United States in terms of really trying to combat sources of global warming. So I can, you know, walk you through an example of what we ended up doing, or how we went about it. Yeah. And, but I do want to make sure that this isn’t about, you know, us looking great. Doing, this is something that we think every business can do. So we didn’t know the first thing about it two years ago. And so we found an MBA class at Suffolk University in Boston, that was looking for a partner to become the topic for the course. And so we had about 29 Students take a look at, our business and our industry. And we asked them to figure out how can we actually calculate the carbon impact our business has on the environment, and not just us. But certainly, you know, all the work we do for the clients. And with Greek, we do a lot of direct mail work, as you mentioned in my bio, outside looking in, boy, that means you’re cutting down trees. And that is true. And you know, after the tree is cut down, the tree has to find its way to a paper mill, that’s got to burn off a lot burn a whole bunch of carbon. From there, the paper mill has to process it into something that actually can be printed on, and then, it has to go someplace where it actually can get printed. So there’s, we made a whole bunch of assumptions based on the best knowledge that we had.
Can you share your most successful or favorite networking experience that you’ve had?
There’s an organization called Agency Management Institute, it’s a community of like-minded people trying to tackle like-minded. similar challenges. Even though it’s a group of folks that are competing, sometimes quite, quite aggressively with each other. It’s a community. And, you know, if you’re just talking about, you know, how hard it is to find great people to join your agency right now, that’s hard, and being able to network with folks that have that type of, of issue, and they want to help they, you know, maybe they have someone on their team that’s not you know, being as productive or not a great fit, but they can find out that it’s a great fit for someone else. Who has that, you know, a similar need for that type of person? That’s what, you know, building communities is all about, you know, one of our target audiences here for what we’re doing, which is, you know, pro bono on steroids is we’re trying to get other marketing companies to think more about how they’re contributing to global warming. And you know, the AMI network is perfect for that. And, you know, we’re still just getting going in our movement here at zero marketing. Excuse me, net zero now, dot marketing. But, no, we aren’t getting, you know, some interest. And we’re happy to share this because it’s good for everybody. It’s good for our business.
How do you stay in front of and nurture those relationships in that network in that community that you create?
Well, social media is certainly important. I find in my circle, LinkedIn is super powerful. So let’s, you know, coming out of a pandemic, it’s interesting to start mingling with real humans and, you know, being able to shake hands give hugs and things like that. It’s all, you know, making sure we are, it places where, you know, our community is, is very important. But I think a lot of us were getting used to hiding behind, if you can call this hiding, hiding behind the zoom camera. And, you know, some folks have been, you know, reticent to get get back out there, or when they’re out there, you almost forget how to be Truly Social. So I encourage anyone to listen right now. That’s, that’s a comfort zone that I don’t think we all want it to be in the beginning, just myself, personally. Sure, getting out and talking to people and you know, beginning to have group meetings and getting together with clients face to face again, it’s just been fantastic. And but it has taken. It’s moving into a new comfort zone again.
If you could go back to your 20-year-old self, Bruce, what would you tell yourself to do more or less of or differently concerning your professional career?
Listen to my gut more than other influencers I have in my life. So I for one started my career at I was always known as a marketing guy, and spent my early 20s at Procter and Gamble, helping them sell lard in the form of Duncan Hines products, Pringles potato chips, and Crisco oils. And, you know, as a marketing guy, but that wasn’t going to be for me, because everything was convincing folks to spend $1.49 on lard. So what did I do, I went back to business school, then I became a banker, which is not anything I wanted to be, but somehow there was an expectation, I think that that was a good prudent move. And that expectation came from my parents and their friends and things like that. And but all along there, my gut was saying, you know, I really shouldn’t be doing something different than being you know, a guy that was you know, being a product manager for products that didn’t matter as much to me as you know, the fun of creating, creating needs and communications and things like that. So it probably took me a while. 20 years to break out of that. But my gut all along was saying, you know, this isn’t the right career for you. So I guess that would be the advice there. We all have a gut. We have intuition. And we have, you know, messaging, it’s in our head that conflicts with the environment we’re in often. I think, you know, over time, I’ve gotten better at that. But if I did that in my 20s, I can’t imagine what my life would be like now.
Any final words or advice you’d like to offer our listeners about growing and supporting your network?
I think if you there’s always any situation has a right answer. And any wrong answer. Sometimes you might need to think through the gray area a little bit. But most of us, I think know what the right thing to do is in this situation. That would be the advice to do the right thing.
Connect with Bruce
Email: bmcmeekin@bkmmarketing.com
Transcript
We've all heard it before. It's who you know. Welcome to Social Capital of weekly podcast that dives into social relationships and why the
Lori Highby:Hey everybody, Lori Highby here, welcome to the social capital podcast. Our show notes are found at social capital podcasts that come to
Lori Highby:strategy, tips, all podcast episodes and upcoming events. If you'd like to connect, make sure to send a note with your connection request that
Lori Highby:BKM. Marketing, a Boston based integrated marketing agency focused on helping clients grow their businesses. BKM marketing creates about 100
Lori Highby:and examine the marketing industry's carbon impact as a whole. Bruce, welcome to the show.
Unknown:Well, Laurie, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me to be one of your guests.
Lori Highby:But I'm excited to have you and I'm fascinated, I'm intrigued and, and I love what you're doing by seeing tying the business of what
Unknown:Well, you know, it's really interesting. For first and foremost, I live in Washington area, and we have an ocean nearby. And everyone's
Unknown:company does, how what what kind of impact that has, and also the industry. And it was really enlightening to see how much is damage actually we are
Unknown:all the client work that we do. And so far, it's been very well received. And one of the things that we get asked some follow up to that all the time
Unknown:social or environmental issue. That's nine out of 10. When you look at millennials 68% of millennials buy a product with a social environmental
Lori Highby:Great. 92%. That's fascinating. 82%
Unknown:Wow, very
Lori Highby:cool. So how can our listeners go about making their businesses net zero now?
Unknown:Well, there's several ways to go about it, the first thing you really have to do is learn what is what is what is your carbon footprint,
Unknown:certainly I don't know how many years but a half a decade, decade ahead of the United States in terms of really trying to combat sources of global
Unknown:class at Suffolk University in Boston, that was really looking for a partner to become the topic for the course. And so we had about 29 Students
Unknown:down trees. And that is absolutely true. And you know, after the tree is cut down, the tree has to find its way to a paper mill, that's got to burn
Unknown:someplace to get mailed. And then it has to get shipped to the post office and the post office has to ship it all over the place. So there's a whole
Unknown:information came out of out of Europe is digital marketing. Depending on how you define it accounts for as much as 4% of all global greenhouse gas
Unknown:gobs of electricity. There's miles of underseas cables, which is routers that connect all these data centers around the globe, those need energy to
Unknown:renewable energy sources that are only about 12% of all of the energy that is used to create electricity, the remaining 88%, you bet, emit co2,
Unknown:you and I had going back to set up this wonderful time to get together and talk about this, that's four grams, you attach a photo to an email, you get
Unknown:online video, and this, this is pre pandemic numbers. So before the the advent of all the video communication we're doing in place of, you know,
Unknown:the world to find this types of this type of information. A university in Argentina actually did a study trying to figure out, you know, is direct
Unknown:the type of research you need to sit down and try to figure out for your own business. Unfortunately, there's a bunch of tools out there that we
Unknown:business like we are your clients have to make decisions about how they want to, in our business, we make marketing decisions. So they, What
Unknown:if you travel by air, how much shipping you do, what are your employees, community habits, looks at the number of servers that you might have in
Unknown:It does it all in common units, that's another thing you find when you start calculating this thing. There's short tons, there's pounds, there's
Unknown:to offset. We'll talk about offsets a little bit more shortly, but it gives you a chance to actually make a contribution through terrapass, that would
Unknown:little bit more complicated. But to simplify it, you hear a lot about the word supply chain these days, supply, every business has a supply chain.
Unknown:So this is a tool relevant to our industry, you may find in your own industry, there's other tools out there. odds are they're coming from
Unknown:what happened to it to actually get here? How did it get here? How did it get shipped. And so this tool, the paper calculator will give you a whole
Unknown:first did this last year, in 2021, it turned out our we needed to offset everything that we possibly could in that process through tree planting. So
Lori Highby:Wow, that's awesome.
Unknown:That is that is a lot of trees. The alias last year alone I think they came in around 20,000 trees that we needed to offset or used to offset
Unknown:we found that the better offset for us with terrapass. But there are plenty of other offsetting options out there, which I'd be happy to talk more
Lori Highby:Yeah. No, you? I'm just,
Unknown:I mean, I'm rambling away.
Lori Highby:No, you got some good information. I'm actually I loaded up terrapass.com. Just kind of looking at that. Really fascinating. I'm
Unknown:Oh, you know, we do try to do ours in North America, once you plant it, since the time we met them two years ago, it has just blossomed
Unknown:net zero now, which is sort of our mantra. And actually, if you go to net zero now, dot marketing, that's a subset of our core website that talks all
Unknown:taking down the trees, but still achieving marketing goals of our clients. Now, one of the things we believe came to realize is that direct mail is
Unknown:not worry about targeting, let's just blast it all out there. And that's still happening span is just totally out of control. And that's one of the
Unknown:we've been doing just as a matter of good business is doing a much better job of minimizing the amount of waste that we have in marketing. One of the
Unknown:the globe. And that's fantastic. If you've tried to calculate the amount of carbon that goes into building one, windmill, or wind turbine, so the
Unknown:even on that carbon investment. Does that make sense?
Lori Highby:Yeah, that's, that's crazy, actually. And that's that's usually like, the while the life of the windmill, at least the what's the
Unknown:Oh, exactly.
Lori Highby:There's a lot of interesting too.
Unknown:Yeah. So but if you start looking at all of your activities in terms of how much carbon that it takes me to accomplish this, and, you
Unknown:be seeing a much different marketing mix.
Lori Highby:I love inspired me in a lot of ways right now.
Unknown:It's so complicated to figure out, is, you know, I'm trying to be very simplistic in terms of I been looking at this for a couple of years, I
Unknown:that you're looking at India, you know, there's a fact that 18% of the impact of of climate change is being felt in India, yet they've only
Unknown:output this year is supposed to be 20 to 25% less because of too much heat in in the in the plains and not to mention all the fires that have been
Lori Highby:wow. Oh man, I'm trying to find a good point to transition to a lighter topic but this is pretty heavy stuff and it's really
Unknown:fun and we can do something about it like if there was anything at all is we saw a massive shift in human behavior and the just levels of smog
Unknown:But it gives you hope that you know if we change human behavior, you can start cleaning the environment there were fish swimming in the in the
Lori Highby:Well, this is a good time to transition then. But before we do that, we're gonna listen to a quick commercial from our sponsor here
Unknown:Bruce. Excellent. Social capital is sponsored by Keystone click. Located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Keystone clique is a strategic digital
Lori Highby:Or you can get it mailed to you. All right, so
Unknown:downloads are probably one off versus the whole,
Lori Highby:Sir, we've got them printed too. So, you know, the big picture purpose of the show is networking, building relationships, and you know,
Lori Highby:experiences that you've had Bruce,
Unknown:one of my favorite networking experiences? Gosh, no, it absolutely has to be. There's an organization called agency Management Institute that
Unknown:I'm pretty sure that's
Unknown:No, but the thing that's so neat about it is that it's it's a community of like minded people trying to tackle like minded. similar challenges. Even
Unknown:maybe they have someone on their team that's not you know, being as productive or not a great fit, but they can find out that it's a great fit
Unknown:the AMI network is perfect for that. And, you know, we're still just getting going in our movement here at zero marketing. Excuse me, net zero
Lori Highby:Yeah, no, I love how you brought it back to the carbon footprint a little bit here. But I I 100% agree with you. The agency
Lori Highby:vacations out of it, we we intentionally plan to spend more time together, which isn't normal. I feel like it's Yeah, bigger group. So
Unknown:you just want to see, you know, people succeed. And I think a lot of the world now is realizing that, you know, you don't need to be afraid
Lori Highby:thank you.
Unknown:I appreciate 300 How many what episode number is this? 303,000 something I
Lori Highby:don't know. That's outside. We're in the 360s range. I believe I don't have the exact number in front of me. But yeah, that's kind of
Unknown:I really feel honored to be on this and have an opportunity to share some of the work that we've been doing. And you know, it's very
Lori Highby:So I'm going back to the networking conversation, how do you stay in front of my best nurture your network in your community? How do I
Unknown:Well, social media is certainly important. I find in my circle, LinkedIn is super powerful. So let's, you know, coming out of a pandemic,
Unknown:there's folks that have been, you know, reticent to get get back out there, or when they're out there, you almost forget how to be Truly Social. So I
Unknown:comfort zone again, it
Lori Highby:really is. And you're not you, you and I were just talking about this before, when we were at the agency Management Institute
Unknown:And you know, we haven't I don't listen, I haven't been multitasking during this conversation. I don't know if you have to answer
Lori Highby:Oh, I totally agree with that. 100%. I'm going to ask you another fun question that I have a gut feeling and know where you're gonna
Unknown:Listen to my gut more than other other influencers I have in my life. So I for one actually started my career at I always known as a
Unknown:which is not anything I really wanted to be, but somehow there was an expectation, I think that that was a good prudent move. And that
Unknown:creating needs and communications and things like that. So it probably took me a while. 20 years to break out of that. But my gut all along was saying,
Lori Highby:Yeah, I, I believe that very much trust, trust your instincts lean into them. But I mean, your guts gonna give you some direction based
Unknown:yeah, yeah, same thing with what we're doing with sustainability. My gut says it's absolutely the right thing. We've we've done harm to our
Lori Highby:Yeah. All right. Great business sense.
Unknown:But it does. Yep. That's something we have to do.
Lori Highby:But it's for the greater good, which I appreciate and respect that you're doing that. I'm going to give you the opportunity to interview
Unknown:How on earth have you put together such a great community? i One of the things that totally impresses me about
Unknown:you, Laurie is you've you have just truly put together 1000s of people and gotten them interested and kept them motivated to keep learning about all
Lori Highby:The how part I don't know. I'm just trusting my gut.
Unknown:I see it developing.
Lori Highby:What drives me, you know, I, some self reflection will just come pouring out right now, I'm totally winging my answer. Because I love
Lori Highby:one of the greatest things that brings me joy is when someone comes back. It we're, we're so the main thing right now is like when a past employee or
Lori Highby:thing that's just makes me so happy to help others, you know, move forward and achieve their goals. Because of the information and experiences that
Lori Highby:give that back as well. And that's where I think I started building a sense of community to some extent. I mean, I couldn't I couldn't say who's who's
Unknown:Oh, there's a there's an old baseball adage. If you remember, like the pitch back. You know, the harder you throw the ball at the pitch back,
Lori Highby:Oh, well. Thank you. You're inspiring to me. I love what you're doing with the their global warming netzero initiatives. I heard
Unknown:Oh my gosh, sure. One of the things that we do in terms of planting is the more you take away more you have to give back. But anyone
Unknown:they look nice. So it's the BKM wildflower seed mix. Right well, doesn't that sound fun?
Lori Highby:I love it. I first sign up for some, so send them my way. Excellent. Any final words or advice you'd like to offer our listeners with
Unknown:Um, well do the right thing. That's pretty obvious advice, I guess for some, but for some not so obvious. And
Unknown:I think if you there's always any situation has a right answer. And any wrong answer. Sometimes you might need to think through the gray area a
Lori Highby:Yeah, not it's not always the easy thing to do the right thing. I agree with that. Or the cheapest, correct. That's very true as
Unknown:What's the I imagine this will be in the show notes. But my email address is usually the most effective way to get in touch with me, which is
Lori Highby:All right, well, definitely include that in the show notes. Plus, I'd like to include some of the other resources that you talked about
Unknown:Oh, thank you again for the opportunity to be here. This was fun.
Lori Highby:It was fun. Right, this wraps up our episode of social capital. A huge thank you to Bruce for taking the time to connect with us.
Unknown:That's all for this episode of the social capital podcast. Visit social capital podcast.com For show notes, more episodes, and to see who