No. Stop.

While I think I do many things well (including being humble), marketing for nonprofits is one of my specialties. Nonprofit organizations have so many hurdles stacked against them and have missions of such import that how they get their message out, how they segment and target and how they generate impact is always inspiring.

These are two ads I saw the other saturday while walking around on park and 62nd in NYC.

These are not inspiring, they suck. The copy on the blue one says "Stay alive, volunteer in your community." The copy on the orange one says "Take control of your calories, eat less" and there is a little 'RX' sign at the top and a Mount Sinai logo at the bottom.

While I don't know the story of how those ads got to where they're at, I can hazard a guess. I'm guessing that the city had a certain amount of outdoor ad space that they were looking to off load and they decided to call on the nonprofit community to run something in those spots. Kind of like their civic duty or some bullshit. The nonprofit that got the lucky call was Mount Sinai and they decided "hey, we've got some space, lets put up an ad. Also we're doctors so lets make the ad look like a prescription! won't that be fun" (note, there is a chance Mount Sinai actually purposefully bought the space as some sort of ad campaign but that would mean that they knowingly went out of their way to put something like that up and that . . . I just can't bring myself to believe that someone would knowingly go out of their way and spend money to put those things up)

Why do these ads piss me off so much? First they're hard to read, cars will never be able to pick up the copy or the logo, so they must be for the pedestrians. Of all the pedestrian neighborhoods around is 62nd and park the most socially active neighborhood you can find? It's a lot easier to get someone on the fence or with a slight propensity to do something to do that something rather than getting a leopard to change its spots. Also there is no real call to action or way to help people execute on what the ad is asking them to do. Take the volunteer ad. Do they really think that people have never been asked to volunteer before? That someone is walking down the street, decides to look up, sees the ad asking them to volunteer and says "well, I never thought of that! let me go volunteer somewhere to feel more alive!" I call bullshit on that idea. Next, say someone does decide to volunteer, how am I as a marketer supposed to know that my ad got them to volunteer? How am I supposed to know that I moved the needle? If they provided some sort of number for people to call or website to visit they could provide information on how to execute and track the impact of the ad.

All of that aside, what really pisses me off is that nonprofits always clamor for the scraps of media that are tossed off the side of the table without thinking about whether or not they're the best one to use that media. There is an opportunity cost paid by the people. There could have been a good ad, targeted to the people in the neighborhood with a clear call to action and clear next steps that would help a nonprofit or a social cause, but because the city was too lazy to find that cause or because Mount Sinai was too greedy, we end up with this shit creative wasting space.

There should be a system where the best ads for the space gets the space. The city can have a media dispersal board composed of advertising and marketing and nonprofit specialist who evaluate what could potentially go in those spaces and pick the best one. Better to spend a bit more time and money to find a good cause and a good use of space than to just give the space away to whoever happens to be around at the time.