After watching Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth, I saw that I had to use my profession of creating highly effective public education and community engagement to help the cause of the planet my young children would inherit. 

Already a staunch advocate of protecting wilderness, my then wife and business partner emphatically agreed. We decided to partner with Green Team USA and created Green Team Australia.

Green Team was founded in New York in 1993 – the first advertising and communications agency dedicated to understanding and working with the emerging ‘green’ marketplace. Green Team USA’s client list included Coca Cola, WalMart and Johnson & Johnson.

We were an Australian agency with eight years’ experience in the field of brand creation, public education and corporate social responsibility strategies and winner then of 19 international creative and business awards since 2000. We were already corporate brand specialists with a team of professionals from internal change managers and marketing strategists through to highly qualified designers, writers, media advisers and buyers. 

Green Team USA chose to partner with us and in 2007, we became the first Green Team office outside the United States – Green Team Australia. We were the first Australian communications and advertising company wholly dedicated to guiding companies on the journey to organisational sustainability – with all its implications for brand, consumers and communities.

We now also offered a unique methodology developed over 14 years, including tools for brand audits, organisational sustainability strategies, partnership strategies, community engagement, brand development and a deep insight into the behaviours of a segment we identified as Awakening Consumers™. We conducted deep research into the Awakening Consumer™ specific to Australia.

Our Australian head office was in Hobart. And we had Green Team staff here, as well as Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra.

This partnership and our already successful work for Nyrstar in regional Australia, led us to being appointed to manage Nyrstar’s global communications needs across five continents. 

During this period we were also hired by global Top 100 Company, BASF, their first Australian agency appointment.