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After years of painstaking preparation, the American Chemistry Council is on the verge of launching a multi-million-dollar communications campaign intended to turn the tide of public opinion about the chemical industry.

Details of the campaign, known as essential₂, were revealed earlier this month to executives attending ACC's annual meeting at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. Mark A. Ryan, chief communications officer at Bayer Corp. and the company team leader for essential₂, explained that the campaign's first stage, which involves briefing company employees about the program and giving them tools to speak on behalf of the industry, has already started at some firms and will begin in coming weeks at others.

A revamped ACC website will go live on Sept. 1, and a public relations program will begin on Sept. 15, Ryan said. The campaign's most ambitious component, a series of television advertisements, is expected to launch in the week of Sept. 22. Print advertising will be added in 2006.

Stephen Gardner, ACC staff team leader for the campaign, said the council's board has approved $15 million in essential₂ expenditures for 2005 and $20 million for 2006.

Chemical executives got a first look at the campaign two years ago, when representatives of the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather presented sample print and TV ads at ACC's 2003 annual meeting (C&EN, June 16, 2003, page 15). Council officials anticipated then that the program would launch in 2004--with expenditures near $40 million annually--although they acknowledged that the program would first have to overcome pockets of resistance from member companies.

At a press briefing at this month's meeting, Jeffrey M. Lipton, chief executive officer of Nova Chemicals and chairman of ACC's executive committee, attributed the campaign's longer-than-expected gestation to a need to "capture the imagination of the people who had to pay for it"--in other words, member company owners and executives.

That effort, Lipton said, included extensive focus-group screening of the campaign's effectiveness at influencing people in its three target audiences of informed Americans, policymakers, and plant employees and communities.

Gardner added that his team put considerable energy into addressing tough questions posed by member company leaders. They wanted to know if the campaign's benefits would be lost if a bad accident or other crisis struck the chemical industry. They wanted assurance that the campaign wouldn't detract from gains in public perception of plastics achieved by the American Plastics Council's long-running advertising program, which is being folded into essential₂. And they wanted proof that the campaign would go beyond creating good feelings and actually support advocacy efforts on behalf of the industry. "Those were the three questions we had to answer before the board would say okay," Gardner said.

While focus-group results were satisfying skeptical members, the scaled-back price tag, an improvement in the chemical industry's fortunes, and a proposed change in ACC's dues-payment structure were combining to take the edge off the cost of the campaign, particularly for smaller companies.

Dues for ACC member companies are based on their annual chemical sales. The current system is regressive--dues increase more slowly than chemical sales. But at the annual meeting, Michael E. Campbell, Arch Chemicals' CEO and the current chairman of the ACC board, proposed a change in the council's bylaws that would have all companies pay a flat 0.05% of chemical sales. The proposal was accepted, with the result that dues will increase for larger firms.

THANKS TO the twin effects of improved chemical industry sales and the new dues-payment system, ACC will take in $55.4 million in dues this year, a double-digit increase over 2004. Some 25% of this amount will go to the essential₂ campaign, Campbell reported.

As part of the employee-level rollout now under way, ACC member companies are appointing individuals to be responsible for bringing essential₂ into their firms. At Carus Chemical, a midsized company in Peru, Ill., and the world's largest maker of potassium permanganate, that person is Lynn Solorio, director of community relations.

Solorio told the meeting that Carus started its internal rollout on April 27 to good results, thanks in part to a literature packet and employee video supplied by ACC. She said Carus staffers--from head office workers to unionized plant employees--appreciated that the people featured in the essential₂ video were not paid actors but real employees from real chemical companies.

Solorio urged companies to appoint an internal essential₂ coordinator if they haven't already done so. "I wear many hats at Carus, and this is my favorite one," she said.

Indeed, Gardner is counting on people like Solorio to increase employee buy-in over the summer so that September's public launch of essential₂ will have solid rank-and-file support. At the meeting, he acknowledged that chemical company employees felt left out of ACC's previous stab at image enhancement some 10 years ago. "Employees need to be engaged and energized. We didn't engage them last time, and we want to change that," he said.