Interviewer:  Hi, I’m Gail Nickel-Kailing with WhatTheyThink Going Green, and today I'm here with David Podmayersky, who is with Earth Color.  Earth Color is the winner of the WhatTheyThink Environmental Innovation Award for Thought Leadership.  And, I wanted to ask you, Dave, you have done some really interesting things with a client education program.  So if you could fill me in on what that program is all about.

David Podmayersky:  Sure.  Yeah.  Well, it became obvious early on once we educated ourselves on what sustainability and going green really meant for ourselves, that we were getting a lot of interest from our clients.  You know, they knew they wanted to go green, a lot of the agencies knowing they wanted to go green, a lot of clients needing to go green to support their corporate initiatives that were kind of coming down the pipe.  But they had no idea what that actually meant.

So with sustainability being educational, and marketing and sustainability being educational, we decided we would put together a more comprehensive program for our clients and our supply team partners on the other side further downstream to really determine what that means in terms of specking papers.  What environmental printing is versus environmental papers.  What choices designers and marketers and agencies can make in terms of making their print more environmentally responsible and putting some social integrity to what they were doing

Interviewer:  So have you had a large number of clients involved in that?  Is there an ongoing program or is it one on one?  How does that work?

David Podmayersky:  Well, we look - we do it both ways.  We hold, you know, public symposiums and we team up with partners in our supply team.  So be it on the paper side, be it print, be it ink suppliers, so we’ll do public symposiums.  You know, we really feel that moving the bar for everybody and this isn’t an area where we need to be competitive, but collaborative, so sharing information is paramount.  So we’ll do it one by one with clients, but we’ll go, you know, individual groups and then we’ll do it a variety of ways.  Whatever is going to get the message out that it’s really going to add environmental integrity to the discussion.

Interviewer:  Great.  Thank you, David and congratulations on winning the Leadership Award.

David Podmayersky:  Thank you.

Interviewer:  You bet.