Back in 2011, I wrote a post about TerraCycle's ongoing quest to create what we call negative-cost marketing. In other words, we're always looking for ways to persuade other people to pay us to tell the world about TerraCycle, rather than our having to pay them. So far, we've had a good bit of success doing this.
We started by taking an aggressive approach to public relations. This was out of necessity, because we didn't have the budget to advertise effectively, but then it grew to become our marketing strategy.
To get consistent public relations, we learned how to tell our story. Our first product, for example, was organic fertilizer. Instead of talking about fertilizer, though, we billed ourselves as selling "worm poop in a used soda bottle." With public relations, it's important to go after as big an audience as possible and to make it easy for reporters to understand and write about the story you are pitching. I still remember when Guideposts Magazine, a Christian publication, and High Times, a marijuana magazine, published very similar articles about TerraCycle, proving that a good story can cross perceived boundaries.
Within 10 years, TerraCycle was being written about an average of 19 times a day. In part, again, this was because we had a good story to tell. Most of the stories were about schools that enlisted in one of our free brigade programs that encourage students to collect non-recyclable waste — pens, glue sticks, juice pouches — that we would then recycle or "upcycle" into new products. Even though the marketing experts we talked to told us that we couldn't rely on public relations alone, we managed to get more publicity every year.
This outreach helped create great relationships with journalists at a variety of publications. Eventually, instead of just pitching stories, we began to offer to help create content, mainly through blog posts. We would provide high-quality, non-promotional — or perhaps modestly promotional — content on a variety of topics tailored for each publication.
Before long, we were blogging for Inc. magazine, Treehugger, Industry Intelligence, Packaging Digest, and Green Child. Some sites even paid us. While the revenue wasn't significant, the impact on our marketing and business was significant. The blogging helped build the expert profile of our top executives, leading to more speaking opportunities, more industry recognition and even to book deals and TV deals.
As a result, the revenue our marketing department generates today offsets a large percentage of the costs it incurs. And every year we get closer to running a truly profitable marketing department.
In our efforts to reach that goal, our dream has always been to get our own reality TV series. While our public relations efforts generate lots of opportunities to make television appearances on various shows, news programs and documentaries — including "Oprah," "Good Morning America," and the "Today" show — we have never had our own series. The closest we came was a four-part mini-series that appeared on the National Geographic Channel and was called "Garbage Moguls."
The mini-series was informative, and it definitely promoted TerraCycle. The concept was to show our efforts to take various streams of waste and turn them into useful products. The drama in each show would be about whether we could turn waste into a product within the allotted time. TV loves a ticking clock.
In the end, however, not that many people watched the shows. This taught us an important lesson: If we really want to achieve negative-cost marketing, the content has to come first and our promotional objectives second. This is somewhat counter-intuitive and runs contrary to most traditional marketing strategies.
In the following years, we kept thinking about different ways to do a show, perhaps by putting more emphasis on our people than on our process. We found an agent, we found a production company that produced a demo, and we held meetings with dozens of networks in Los Angeles and New York. We were rejected by all of them.
The most frustrating part of the process was that it was very difficult to trust anything we were told by the networks and entertainment companies, which are notorious for sugar-coating. We rarely knew what people were really thinking until they stopped replying to our emails. This made the sales process hard, and we never got the kind of feedback that would have allowed us to improve our pitch. Then, about a year and a half ago, we met with a new cable network called Pivot.
I had heard of Pivot through the Social Venture Network, a community of social entrepreneurs. Pivot, which targets socially minded millennials, had been introduced in 2013 by Participant Media, a global entertainment company that had backed films and documentaries like "Lincoln," "Good Night and Good Luck," "The Help," "An Inconvenient Truth," "Waiting for Superman," and "Food, Inc."
We were attracted by Pivot's expanding cable distribution along with its interest in socially conscious entertainment. The company helped us rethink our concept for a show that now focuses less on TerraCycle's mission and more on the lives and personalities of our people — and the comedy that tends to ensue in our quirky offices.
We thought the tradeoff was worth it, and we ended up putting together a deal for 10 30-minute episodes. Best of all, TerraCycle does get paid — a healthy five-figure amount — although that amount is modest compared to the time and effort we have had to invest in the project. The first episode of "Human Resources" will appear Friday night at 10 E.S.T.
Tom Szaky is the chief executive of TerraCycle, which is based in Trenton.
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