I hope you enjoyed your July 4th holiday this week. We were excited to welcome our newest team member recently, Nancy MacKneson, who has taken the role as our Director of Business Development (read more about Nancy here). Of course, Nancy's arrival is not the only new thing around here. SRB is proud to announce that we also recently won a Gold for Online Marketing from the Summit International Creative Awards, as well as second place for Website Advertising from the Jersey Awards.

We have been keeping busy working for our clients, including new ones such as Working Assets Wireless and the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and by attending a number of great marketing and green events. For those of you who missed the excellent LOHAS 10 conference, be sure to check out these session videos of the event, including a panel on LOHAS Marketing with speakers from Patagonia and Wild Oats. I also recently spoke at the All Things Organic conference, and will be speaking again soon at ad:tech Chicago along with Jurriaan Kamp, co-founder and chief editor of Ode Magazine. I was honored to be interviewed on the ad:tech radio show about marketing to values-based consumers (listen to the mp3 of the show here).

Our long time readers will notice that we recently redesigned this newsletter to match our website. For this issue of Conscious Clicks, we put together an article outlining some of the trials and tribulations of designing an email newsletter that looks and functions well across most of the common email services. We also link to a recent article I wrote published by our friends at Worthwhile Magazine, and discuss the battle between search engine advertising programs (such as Google AdWords and the new Microsoft AdCenter) over the features they offer to advertisers. And finally, this newsletter wouldn't be complete without a dose of humor, this time featuring the environmentalist on everyone's mind: Al Gore.

Enjoy & best regards,

Perry Goldschein

We recently spent some time redesigning our email newsletter, Conscious Clicks, to match the look and feel of our current website. One of the hardest things about designing email is that you aren't just worried about how it will display in all of the major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari) like normal web page design, but you also have to think about all of the services and software that people use to view their email. Of course, there is more to it than that.

Wal-Mart recently announced a strategy to lessen its environmental impact. GE is focusing on "Ecomagination." And McDonald's has begun serving organic, fair-trade coffee in hundreds of its New England locations. How the world has changed.

In just a few years, waves of companies, including many of the world's biggest, have begun realizing the benefit of integrating values and ethics with their drive for profit. Not only are environmental and social responsibility no longer on the fringes of the business world, they are now among its hottest trends.

Read the full article from Worthwhile Magazine, republished by WSJ.com >

Google recently announced it is now allowing dayparting in their AdWords system. This will allow Google advertisers to target their ads by day of week and the time of day. Curiously, this announcement comes just one month after the official US launch of Microsoft's competing search advertising program, MSN adCenter. The MSN adCenter system was the first of the top tier search advertising systems (which also includes Google and Yahoo) to offer dayparting as well as targeting by demographics.

Read more >

Another excellent example of viral marketing at its best. This short video from the animated TV show Futurama promoting the new Al Gore film 'An Inconvenient Truth', has been spreading like wildfire on the video sharing site YouTube. Click here to watch Al Gore beat up a robot (via WorldChanging.com).