In December 2008, GreenBiz.com Executive Editor Joel Makower talked with IBM Corporation's Rich Lechner, Vice President of Energy & Environment, and John Kennedy, Vice President of Integrated Marketing Communications, about the company's "Smarter Planet" advertising campaign. (See related blog post.)

Following is the transcript of the interview, edited for clarity.

Joel Makower: We all see so many corporate ad campaigns. And I've always been curious about how these come about and the thinking behind them. So, let's talk about the Smarter Planet campaign -- how this came to be, what it's about, from both a marketing standpoint and also from a company business strategy standpoint, and what success looks like.

John Kennedy: Well, it really started off as observing what was happening in the world through the experiences of our clients, and through our own experience as a company, and observing that the world has become flatter -- and Tom Friedman had made that concept very popular. As a result of globalization, the world is becoming smaller as improvements in technology and explosion of bandwidth have made the world feel smaller, but that something just as profound was happening in that the world at the same time was becoming much smarter.

Globalization has many benefits, but also some tradeoffs because many of the systems that the world operates in today -- and by systems, we mean systems in every sense of the word, from systems in companies, to manmade systems and natural systems -- needed to become smarter, to handle and take advantage of the greater connectedness in the world.

So it started off with those observations. And the more we worked on this, we began to realize that not only was this a dynamic that was very compelling, but as well, we felt that it was a good opportunity for IBM. This is a company that covers multiple industries, has a depth of research -- has through our entire history taken on some of the toughest problems in the world in a way to help the world work better, to help our clients' companies work better, and help governments and universities work better. So we felt like it was a very natural platform for us.

Rich Lechner: I think that green and the whole energy-efficiency crisis have provided a very compelling and very visible manifestation of the need for the world's infrastructure to become more intelligent. As we looked around, there was no shortage of examples of the kinds of inefficiencies that existed in the world today. In a world in which water, energy, power are severely constrained, you don't have to look far to see, for example, that only 30 percent of the potential electricity that's available at the energy source actually reaches the doorstep of the consumer. Or that significant amounts of traffic congestion are caused just by people circling, looking for empty parking spaces, wasting fuel. You can look at our distribution systems around the world and see that more than 20 percent of all the shipping containers and more than 25 percent of the trucks moving around on a global basis are empty. You look at the way that food is distributed and understand that the average carrot in the United States -- the lowly carrot -- has traveled 1,600 miles to get to your dinner table, and you say clearly something could be done to improve the efficiency of our food distribution system. And water: We're projecting that over a billion people won't have access to safe drinking water in just ten years time, and yet today, just five food and beverage companies consume enough water on an annual basis to serve the daily needs of everyone on the planet.

We looked around and we said there's plenty of room for improvement and our expertise in IT [information technology] coupled with our deep industry knowledge and our ability to look at and re-engineer processes gave us a unique vantage point to comment on the need to exploit this growing intelligence and where the first opportunities for exploitation might exist.

Kennedy: The benefits that would accrue to society and also to commercial enterprise is another good one, one that is particularly current when you look at the crisis in the current financial markets. A major aspect of that crisis is the fact although our financial systems and the mechanisms traded on those systems are increasingly sophisticated, the system itself wasn't smart enough to manage the complexities of the risk and to have visibility of the risk end-to-end in the financial system.

So the fact that a mortgage could be taken out in the United States, subprime, bundled into a portfolio, and traded numbers of times to wind up on another bank's balance sheet -- the system did not have sufficient level of intelligence so that the bank that held that asset could understand what the nature of the risk was. That risk was accrued, or at least started, way down at the other end of the chain.

That's another example of a system that could be a lot smarter. And we have a lot of this technology. We have the intelligence. We have the instrumentation. We have examples today of smarter food systems where we can use technology to trace food from the farm to the fork, if you will, to address things like food quality issues, and to address recall issues, and things like that.

So much of this technology and computing power is there and as we started going through this and thinking about the various systems, the list just kept getting longer and longer. We started thinking about smart traffic, smart food, smart healthcare, smart government, smart water, smart retail. I mean we just went on and on and saw many opportunities to think about the world from this system perspective. We're looking at the world as a set of systems and not just an ecosystem around a company necessarily, or even an ecosystem around an industry, but an end-to-end system of all the participants, and so that's been another outcome of the work we're doing.

Makower: So, you've got this systemic view of how the world works and through that lens you see a great many inefficiencies and in some cases malfunctions that could be addressed through some of your technologies and solutions, and it's not just environmental. It's obviously much broader than that but certainly around energy, climate, environmental protection, there's a wealth of these opportunities.

Talk a little bit about the marketing and messaging side of this. You've created a "Smarter Planet" ad series. Tell me what this campaign looks like and the breadth of it in terms of the kinds of things you're doing and the kinds of places it's showing up.

Kennedy: Our first ad was on November 17, but our official public discussion was in a speech that our chairman, Sam Palmisano, gave at the Council on Foreign Relations on November 6th, titled "A Smarter Planet: The Next Leadership Agenda." So that was Step One. Step Two is an ad series we're running -- and we actually are calling it an "op-ad" because it's different from a traditional advertisement. They are running weekly and they are in a series, running every Monday in a set of national newspapers.