Amazing Cause Marketing

I love rebel shit. Something harsh and amazing to wake people up out of there stupors, I think is great. Maybe not all the time but sometime, I think it's important that someone goes totally over the deep end. With that in mind, I've posted the video for M.I.A.'s latest single below. Before you watch it let me warn you: it is NOT safe for work (violence, language, some brief nudity). I'm not a huge fan of the song, but this video . . .this video is going to fuck up your chackra for the rest of the day. But it is worth watching because it speaks to a number of causes through the use of analogy and thanks to M.I.A.s brand you can tell the causes she is referencing. This is something that any reputable organization would never directly sponsor but the power of this video is undeniable, even if it goes too far at times, and after watching it, you want to do something. I felt like I wanted to go into the street and start a protest to end inequality. It drives you on a deep gut level to want to take action, and at the end of the day, isn't that our goal as marketers for a mission?

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Something else that this video makes me think about is the human need to be consistent and how that is rarely utilized in marketing for missions. Essentially, even if you don't agree with M.I.A.s stance on the Tamil Tigers, after seeing this video, you can at least agree that people shouldn't be abused for how they were born or who they are. Once you've gotten someone to believe that, they would be far more likely to support equal rights for LGBT people, or abolishing racism, or ending the inequalities that plague our world, because those issues have the same ideological foundation (i.e. that people should not be abused for who they are). I feel that we often get so caught up in the differences of our causes that we ignore the similarities and, as such, miss out on opportunities to partner with unlikely allies that essentially believe the same things we believe.

Jealous of my boogie!

This morning I got on the train and sat down to read my latest book (Thinkertoys) and promptly this fat guy gets on the train and begin singing prince songs at the top of his lungs. I, like everyone else on the train, immediately get pissed off because all I want to do first thing in the morning is have a nice quite relaxing trip to the office, not listen to an american idol reject. I mean, this guy was so loud and so obnoxious that doing anything but listening to him was impossible. So I sat there and tried my best to read my book, but then I stopped and I thought about how silly I was. The guy was standing there completely oblivious to the feelings of everyone (by now he had moved on to singing RuPaul songs) but he was totally and completely happy in himself singing his heart out, and I was sitting there like a tool trying to pretend I didn't hear him. I heard him, and what's more, when would I next have a chance to hear a fat guy sing RuPaul on the train? I can read my book anytime, but this was a chance to have a beautiful unique moment. So I closed my book and opened myself up to the experience of hearing him sing. And frankly he wasn't that bad. He was singing "Don't be jealous of my boogie" and I realized that I was totally jealous of his boogie. That absolute abandon to do whatever the fuck he wants when and where he wants, with no care about what anyone thought. That's a beautiful thing and something we should all aspire too. Every day, the trip to work could be symphony!

When he got off the train, I was actually disappointed, and spent the rest of the day singing RuPaul with a smile on my face.

Guerrilla Nonprofit Marketing!

Don't tell the powers that be, but deep down inside I am a hard core guerrilla revolutionary (well, actually not that deep down). Now of course that's not in the "praise the lord and pass the ammunition sort of way" but in a fight the power, rage against the machine, tear down the hegemony of the the mind sort of way. Nothing, and I mean nothing, makes me happier than to see some hard core non-comformist revolutionary shit and I think nonprofits, who aren't really being controlled by a need to make profit and grow shareholder value have the space to really do some hard core non-comformist revolutionary shit (HCNCRS). Sadly they don't. They don't because they're too scared of alienating donors and the conservative powers that be that run all the big foundations and governments. So all the hcncrs gets done by artists (who, if you think about it, are often the real shit when it comes to promoting a social cause/message without the fear that someone won't donate money). Therefore it is not a suprise that something like this,









which is a candy bar wrapped in the word Bulemia, was scattered about the city by our friends at TrustoCorp. This type of HCNCRS could have easily been done by a ton of nonprofits out there who's mission it is to fight obesity, been done cheap, and gotten a ton of buzz. Sadly it wasn't because the industry is still often afraid to take a stand and do something exciting and different. I think rather than leaving it to artists to be the sole risktakers when it comes to pushing a social agenda, NPOs need to truly embrace the HCNCRS soul that (I believe) exists in all nonprofits. Being a non profit is a revolutionary idea and nonprofits should take that lack of fear and direct it to all that they do, including their marketing and communications. I mean, look at all the chatter the 'Truth' stuff generated. This isn't hard, it just requires enough guts to be willing the push the envelope.



PS this was also put up by TrustoCorp in Williamsburg. Not exactly pushing a social cause (or is it?)

shenanigans

Normally I like to keep this focused more on nonprofits or business or whatever is bouncing around in my head but I just saw this a few seconds ago and I felt the need to post it.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2010/0419/Found-iPhone-4G-a-rare-breach-of-Apple-secrecy

Apparently someone lost an apple 4 g phone at a bar and Gizmodo got their hands on it. I personally have a very hard time believing that this was just a mistake. To me this sounds like either a marketing gag or someone stole a phone and sold it to Gizmodo. I've learned to believe none of what I see and only half of what I think.

The mind-body connection

I saw this article the other day about how the position and activity of the body impacts the mind.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527535.100-mind-over-matter-how-your-body-does-your-thinking.html?full=true

It's actually kind of interesting because I think so often we see the mind and the body as different things that just so happen to always hang out with each other. what I find expecially interesting is that we're taught to sit still to think. So many of us have jobs that are focused on our ability to think and we spend all of our time sitting still in our cubicles.

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.

Be the heart surgeon

I am a consultant, more specifically a general management consultant, and one of my biggest gripes with being a consultant is that the general consultant model is there to benefit the company that the general consultant works for, not so much the client.
I always liken it to being a doctor. If you have absolutely no idea what's wrong with you, it makes sense to go to a primary care physican, because they can diagnose your sickness and perhaps help solve some health problems, but if you have some sense of our problems, i.e. you have a heart attack, you don't want to go to a PCP, you'll go to a heart docotor. Most of the times, organizations are run by people with knowledge of what's going wrong in their companies, so they don't need a PCP to diagnose their issues, they need a specialist in marketing, or org or finance. Consulting companies want to staff themselves with generalist because (they say) that you get a wide assortment of projects and can learn about wide variety of issues and blah, blah, blah, but in reality the driving issue is that a staff full of generalist means you can staff easily (it's called being frontable). But imagine if instead an organization was staffed by specialist? It would be a nightmare for the staffing person but the clients would get people who have a deep knowledge of their particular issue.
I believe the key is to do away with the generalist consulting organization model and replace it with smaller specialist agencies. Clients should get people who have a deep and refined knowledge of their problems, no ta generalist who has to reinvent the wheel (or learn how the wheel works from a specialist partner) every time. When I go to get heart surgery I want a heart surgeon, not a team of PCP's and so do clients. Business needs to stop focusing on what it needs and more on what's best for the clients.

Where are all the black people?

Once again the world of advertising and marketing are remembering about the black problem. That problem being of course that there are barely any african amerians making the ads and the brands, despite the fact that african americans are hyperconsumers of products. I saw this article the other day at ad age saying that ad agencies are still doing a poor job of hiring blacks and (kind of randomly) i went to this site ihaveanidea.org with profiles of leading creatives and, no suprise, there are no african americans on the site. I think it's a problem of exposure (I know a few AA CD's that are worth profiling) and a problem of hiring, which leads to a kind of chicken and egg situation (young AA's don't even consider advertising and marketing as a viable option because there are no role models).
We need a new system, where AA's are are taking the reigns. Real power is never given, it is only taken and young entrepreneurship minded AA's will have arise to take the power by force of will and talent.