Scoop it Forward, A Cause-Marketing Campaign Benefiting Volunteer Match

In this second half of my interview with Robert Rosenthal, director of communications at VolunteerMatch he talks about how the nonprofit's new cause marketing campaign, Scoop it Forward, came about and how all the partners are working to make it wonderful. (Read the first half of the interview here.)

6. How did the CRM partnership come about?

Target Corp. has been a long-time partner and recent national sponsor of VolunteerMatch. We also help power their employee program. Recently they renewed their focus on education-related related issues, and it was natural for them to leverage our relationship for a consumer campaign they wanted to do with Ben & Jerry's in time for the National Conference on Volunteering and Service, which took place in NYC.

7. What were your criteria in developing cause campaigns?

Our sweet spot is clients who want to support volunteer engagement in a cause area that aligns with their brand -- not just one or two nonprofits. For example, with Pedigree we have worked together to inspire volunteering at dog shelters.

We look for partners who recognize our model, which is to support both sides of the volunteer engagement match. On the one side are consumers who are inspired to give back with their time and skills, For them the key issues revolve around creative execution, discovery of opportunities, incentives to get involved and opportunities to share the experience. On the other side of the match are nonprofit organizations that are looking to leverage volunteers as resources toward their mission. For these we need to raise awareness about the benefits of using our service, as well as expose them to best practices for working with volunteers. We are interested in cause campaigns can drive volunteer engagement on both sides of this match.

In addition to relationships with our thousands of nonprofits, we deliver essential services, tools, data, and consulting service to our cause clients. So we are looking for clients who view us not as a charity they are supporting but as a professional partner.

Beyond that, we partner with brands that have national prominence as we are a national service, and brands with a track record of delivering on their value proposition, which we think is essential to building credibility in our market.

8. What are VolunteerMatch's goals for the campaign? How will you measure your progress?

Our goal is always to connect more volunteers to nonprofits -- and over the years we've developed a core metric of success, our "SROI" (social return on investment), which we apply to all the work we do on our public Web site and our corporate partnerships. In 2009 we helped to generate an SROI of more than $400 million.

How this works varies from campaign to campaign because depending on a partner's program, there can be different sets of causes that can be aligned narrowly or more broadly. For example, for Allstate we have been helping to align its Beyond February campaign with the MLK day of Service. For BlackPlanet.com, we helped them align with African American-related nonprofits through their Black Planet Rising campaign. In another example, at REI.com we're helping to align employee and consumer audiences with environmental causes.

More granularly, we can also track activity in various ways. For Target and Ben & Jerry's we're looking closely at volunteer referral rates and page views on our side, while our partners look closely at coupon redemptions of ice cream, shares, and online buzz.

9. Can you speak about what Target and Ben & Jerry's hope to get from the deal as well?

For our partners, Scoop It Forward symbolizes each company’s shared commitment to volunteerism -- particulary service in support of education and literacy organizations. Both companies are already doing so much in these areas - indeed, giving back to the community has been a part of their DNA from the start. So as much as this is about two brands hoping to build a sustainable relationship with their customers, it is also about two companies investing in local communities.

10. Campaigns with three partners can be very challenging to put together and to manage. Given that, how does the management of the campaign work?

Regardless of how each project is configured, we have been fortunate to have great cause marketing partners. We work in partnership with the company and their marketing partners -- often there are ad, PR or web agencies involved, and there are usually marketing executives from the company involved as well. A few of our partners manage their side directly -- for example, with both REI and Kenneth Cole Productions we worked only with executives at those organizations.

Essentially, everyone contributes their expertise. From our end, we provide our technical solutions and applications, we work with the nonprofits and the volunteeers, and we help with the communications strategy. Our partners on their end are handling media strategy, media buys, most of the creative development, and the public relations.

11. What does the future hold in terms of other CRM campaigns at VolunteerMatch?

The independent sector has always played a key role in solving problems that government and corporations can't solve alone, and the recession has only highlighted the critical needs at schools, libraries, arts organizations, mentor programs, and environmental organizations. Government is strapped, so it's imperative that more companies get involved in programs that can serve the public interest as well as business interests. We've proven our ability to help brands find cause alignment in all kinds of creative and unique ways -- and we're excited to be able to build on these successes.

VolunteerMatch Benefits from Sweet Cause Marketing Deal with Ben and Jerry's and Target

Scoop it Forward, which is was brought to VolunteerMatch by Ben and Jerry's and Target, is VolunteerMatch's newest cause marketing effort.

Scoop it Forward rewards volunteers with a sweet treat of two new varieties of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, both available exclusively at Target.

I put a few questions to Robert Rosenthal, director of communications at VolunteerMatch, about it's history, its present and where its going with cause marketing now and in the future.

Here's the first half of that interview with Robert. The second half will post on Monday, July 26, 2010.

1. How many volunteer placements has VolunteerMatch enabled since its founding in 1995?

VolunteerMatch was formed from the merging of two projects that were doing pioneering work to hotwire the Web for doing good. We officially launched our public Web service in 1998, www.volunteermatch.org, as the first Web resource for finding a great place to volunteer in local communities around the nation. We began building out our network with Web solutions for partner companies and organizations shortly thereafter, and today we are approaching 5 million "volunteer referrals" generated by our service.

Three-quarters of today's referral activity is generated by our public Web service, which is the #1 search result for "volunteer" at Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. The other quarter comes from our wider family of business, campus, and national nonprofit clients.

On the corporate side, we support 70 or so employee volunteer programs at companies like Google, Johnson & Johnson, UnitedHealth Group, Target, Medtronic, Morgan Stanley, and The Gap. We also have a dozen or so cause marketing partnerships with companies seeking to link their brands with volunteer engagement: CMT, Coca Cola, American Express (via TakePart.com), Allstate, Kenneth Cole, Target and Ben & Jerry's are a few examples.

2. How many searches does VolunteerMatch serve up, on average, every day?

VolunteerMatch.org serves up around 180,000 searches each day. Searches happening elsewhere in our network probably add close another 30,000-40,000.

3. How big is your staff?

We have 29 paid stuff, primarily at our headquarters in San Francisco's Chinatown. We are a nonprofit, 501c3 organization with a budget of around $4 million annually. Recently we celebrated our first two consecutive quarters in the black, marking the fulfillment of a promise we made to our early funders to figure out how to stay in business.

4. Do you have any stories of specific individuals whose lives were changed for the better thanks to VolunteerMatch?

Here are 30-40 of them, and we get dozens more each month:
http://www.volunteermatch.org/volunteers/stories/

Some highlights:

Michael Nicklin, National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship - After a movie trailer inspired business consultant Michael Nicklin to make volunteering a focus in his life, a search at VolunteerMatch led him to an opportunity that changed his life once and for all.

Sara Hooker, Volunteer - Growing up in Swaziland, where one in four adults has HIV, Sara Hooker was aware from a young age how some communities face extraordinary challenges. As she become active as a volunteer, she realized that she was not only solving problems – she was growing as a person, too.

Nancy Peyton, Cheerful Givers - Looking to volunteer at her own pace from the comfort of home, Nancy Peyton found the perfect virtual opportunity seeking donations for Cheerful Givers. Now she helps provide birthday gifts to thousands of children whose parents can not afford them.

5. VolunteerMatch is a well-established and well-respected brand with many existing corporate relationships, why go this direction with specific corporate partners?

Our focus has been to organize a marketplace for civic engagement, and we've always recognized that there are lots of stakeholders in this -- municipalities, policy makers, nonprofit organizations, individuals of all ages and backgrounds, faith-based organizations, and corporations are just a few.

To make this work, we've really tried hard to expand our system to create entry points for new intermediaries. Cause marketing partnerships are an obvious strategy for us; not only are we able to help companies align their brands with good intentions and local solutions, we're able to piggyback on media and marketing investments we would never be able to afford on our own -- such as American Express Members Project or Scoop It Forward with Ben & Jerry's and Target.

Today around 73,000 nonprofits participate in our network, but some 1.4 million other nonprofits haven't discovered our solution yet, and many are facing severe resource constraints at a time when their services are most needed. We want to reach them and help them leverage more volunteer resources before it's too late. We're fortunate that so many companies now recognize the value of this kind of strategic alignment; it would be difficult for us to continue to scale our network otherwise.

More Faux Cause Marketing

You ever go to a fancy gala and read the program with all the awkward sponsor announcements in the back?

You know: “The Investment Counselors at Second Fidelity and Trust Congratulate Sumner Redstone as the First Children’s 2010 Father of the Year and Wish Him Every Success!”

That’s kind of what’s at work in this ad from the inflight magazine called Delta Sky.

The magazine had a special feature on Pittsburgh and in that feature was this ad from Bayer, which has its North American headquarters there. On June 5, Pittsburgh hosted the United Nation’s event World Environment Day, and Bayer and its foundation, along with other Pittsburgh corporate mainstays like Alcoa and Heinz, were among the sponsors.

But look at the visual. There’s a shirtless boy gratefully drinking clean water straight from the spigot, a spigot which has that fat, ragged-looking weld that suggests ‘developing world.’ It’s a really splendid picture.

When I saw it, that visual told me that Bayer was doing some kind of clean water campaign in the developing world. Cool! I thought. Although I couldn’t quite locate the positive connection between Bayer and clean water.

And then I read the body copy, which reads in part:

“In a rapidly growing world population, safe drinking water is becoming more scarce. Protecting this valuable resource is a long-time commitment for Bayer. One that we continue to grow at our North American headquarters in Pittsburgh — a city that has revitalized its three rivers to ensure a cleaner, more sustainable future.”

There’s more, but it doesn’t get any better. But the person at fault, in my view, isn’t the copywriter, it’s the art director. This looks like a cause marketing ad because of the visual. It’s not. It’s a self-conscious congratulations ad to the city of Pittsburgh. One in which the picture’s telling a story that isn’t really true.

A pity.

Cause Marketing For Lovers

Last February, before Valentine’s Day, there was a flood of ads featuring a three-way tie-in between the Garry Marshall movie Valentine’s Day, Ford and its Warriors in Pink campaign, an effort on behalf of Susan G. Komen.

The movie is now out on DVD. I know because it arrived in a Netflix envelope last week. (Two words gents: ‘chick flick’).

When it came out, I openly admired the campaign. The movie is filled with starlets and stars. The ad (this one was in People Magazine) and the promotion is designed well-enough to make good use of them all. I suspect Ford and the studio, New Line Cinema, split the advertising cost. Warriors in Pink/Komen for the Cure products get to appear on a lot of star bodies and New Line gets reduced priced advertising.

But now that the movie is available on DVD, where’s the follow-on promotion? Where’s the DVD stuffer that includes a Warrior Wear and gear catalog as worn by the stars? Where’s the behind-the-scenes video of the Warriors in Pink photo shoot with all the stars? Where’s the special feature on the DVD that tells the whys and wherefores of Warriors in Pink? What happened to the www.fordcares.com/valentinesdaymovie website?

No doubt the budgets for the movie promotion are different from the DVD promotion. Probably they’re handled by different people. But Komen really needs to be part of a DVD promotion, too, because it has such staying power. We have kids movies in our DVD library at home that still have their stupid Strawberry Shortcake catalog in them after five years! Don’t ask me why I haven’t thrown that stuff away, but I haven’t.

For a campaign so well put together on the front end, it's a pity to see so much potential ignored on the back end.

We're All Cause Marketers Now

On Monday The New York Times profiled a new cause marketing effort from a maker of healthy snacks and do-gooder Daniel Lubetzky, who owns Kind Healthy Snacks. Lubetzky has a small problem. Some of his competitors, including Snickers Bars from confection giant Mars Incorporated, are also using cause marketing to sell their own snack lines.

The Times reporter, Stuart Elliott, never puts it this directly but the logical question is inescapable. If you're a consumer-facing company with a commitment to cause marketing is it a good thing if your competitors are utilizing cause marketing, too?

All of us who have been involved in cause marketing for more than a decade or so remember that one of our primary sales points to prospects was that cause marketing helps you distinguish your product or service from competitors and gives you a new story to tell customers and the press.

Increasingly that advantage is disappearing.

(The result is a lament like the Gotterdammerung some Americans feel about China’s economic surge over the last two and a half decades. But my response is; the China of 2010 is infinitely better than the China of 1976 (the year Mao died). Certainly China and the Chinese citizenry are better off. On a net level, so too is the United States and the other western democracies.)

Bear in mind that cause marketing still has other advantages:

• It can directly enhance sales and branding.
• It can heighten customer loyalty.
• It can help build employee morale and loyalty.
• It can help improve employee profitability, skills and teamwork.
• It can help employee recruiting and retention and build a pipeline of talent.

More cause marketing helps more nonprofits. And the money causes get from cause marketing is more valuable than the money they get from almost any other source because it comes without strings attached.

Would Daniel Lubetzky prefer that Snickers wasn’t doing its cause marketing campaign? Probably.

But the cause marketing genie’s out of the bottle, folks. And we're all cause marketers now.

Using Sponsorship and Cause Marketing in Lieu of Advertising

In the Great Recession some companies are turning to sponsorship, including cause marketing, instead of carpet bombing us with more ads. Sponsorship is potentially cheaper than just buying ads, probably more targeted, more easily attuned to social media, and ‘stickier.’

Pepsi famously is spending a goodly chunk of its enormous ad budget on its Refresh Project, wherein the company is giving away millions to individuals, small groups, businesses, and organizations who are trying… broadly speaking… to better the world. The giving is determined by popular vote, thus ensuring that funding candidates get the word out. Pepsi has recently... and smartly… added a subset called Refresh the Gulf.

Less well known, perhaps, and less grandiose is Dodge Ram Trucks campaign called Letters for Lyrics. Write a letter to a soldier, take it to your local Dodge Ram dealer and you get the CD 'Breaking Southern Ground.' The campaign’s stated goal is to give away 1 million CDs. A download from the album is available from the Ram Trucks website.

I’m not a big enough country music fan to know the featured group, the Zac Brown Band, but I like this campaign. Someone once described country music as the ‘soft, gooey center of America,’ a portrayal I find fitting. Country music can be sentimental, patriotic, and clever in ways that other popular music seldom wouldn't even try.

("I'd Like to Check You for Ticks," by Brad Paisley comes to mind, for instance).

Given that, here’s a trick I hope Dodge tries. Somewhere hidden in the stack of the million letters they hope to get will be some really emotional stories. Old men who tell of their exploits in earlier wars; young children who tell of their own heartache; decent Americans who just want to help; and more.

Dodge should create a series of web documentaries that go behind those letters to tell the whole story. And then they should give two Dodge trucks away during the CMA Awards in November: one to the letter writer and one to the soldier who received it.

Faux Cause Marketing Ads

I’ve been training people to look for ads that feature cause marketing and... among other things... I tell them to look for unusual logos, emotionally-charged words and special populations like military, fireman, children and animals.

At first blush these two ads… for Eukanuba and Novartis’s over-the-counter drug brands… both seem like they could be cause marketing. Except neither of them are.

The Eukanuba ad has a K-9 dog (with a name, no less) and the endorsement of a handsome, smiling police officer in uniform. Missing is some kind of cause for retired police dogs or some kind of shelter that takes in police dogs that have been injured in the line of duty.

In the Novartis FSI ad we see smiling adults… all women… and children. Surely these women are trying to improve their health by watching what they eat. Or maybe they’re training for a race event that will boost their health while raising some money for the American Heart Association or the HeartTruth.

There’s a special logo for Novartis Cares, which could be an employee-giving campaign or one of those free drug giveaway programs that some pharmaceutical operate for people at home and abroad who can’t afford the regular price of their drugs.

The body copy only reinforces the notion: “Your health and well-being is at the heart of everything we do.” Special emphasis is given to the word ‘heart.’

Instead, Novartis just wants us to buy some more Prevacid or Keri lotion.

Now, I have no problem with commerce. Someone has to get this economy going again and I’m fine if it’s people with dry skin or gas.

For that matter, 400 posts in this blog ought to affirm that I’m OK with most cause marketing, too. But when something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, I’m disappointed when I find a dog in its place!

Counter Cause Marketing

For more than three decades Campbell’s admirable Labels for Education has helped the soup maker maintain pricing power, fend off competitors and kept soup and the company’s other consumer package goods relevant for kids.

The result is that Campbell’s is a veritable fortress, especially in condensed soups, but also in ready-to-eat soups.

One of Campbell’s few competitors of consequence is Progresso, which specializes in ready-to-eat soup and so-called 'meal replacement.' Progresso was privately held but has long been owned by General Mills.

General Mills, of course, has its own label cause marketing program benefiting schools called Boxtops for Education. Boxtops for Education is younger, but no less admirable than Labels for Education and the benefits accrue in cold, hard cash, rather than in goods, which is how Labels for Education works.

Boxtops is now the bigger campaign in part because they allow brands other than General Mills participate. But I note that the Labels for Education website has now stripped out much of the Campbell's branding, suggesting that Labels will now include non-Campbell's brands as well. Already Pop Secret popcorn, which was once owned by General Mills, but sold in 2008 to a co-op called Diamond Foods, is participating in Labels for Education. You can expect more to come.

Progresso participates in Boxtops for Education in one of the clearest cases of counter cause marketing I can think of.

But curiously, for reasons I can’t fathom, not all the varieties of Progresso participate in Boxtops.

To me, it seems that Progresso is marketing against fortress Campbell’s with one hand tied behind its back.

Girl Scouts of America Subtly Changes its Logo

What do you do when you're a 98-year-old institution and you think your logo doesn't quite work anymore?

Girls Scouts of the USA, the world's largest organization for girls, recently updated theirs in a very subtle way.

(The photo illustration comes from Fast Company magazine).

I understand the pressures to change organizational logos having been through the process myself. But looking back on that experience I'm sure we made a mistake.

Nonprofits just don't spend that much time in front of their constituent's eyes for them to make changes in how they present themselves. Few nonprofits can afford to advertise to reinforce their brand. Even when they utilize the miracles of new media to become their own media channnel, it just isn't enough to allow them to change looks, taglines, or missions in a way that resonates with people.

The acid test for the Girl Scouts would be to ask people in a year which logo is the new one. I'll bet no more than 25% could distinguish the old one from the new one.

Cause Marketing for Commodity Items

It's classic economics.

If you're a farmer and you sell a commodity like winter wheat or red delicious apples, you're stuck with the lowest prices, because there's little you can do as an individual farmer to make your product stand out from your competitors.

But fruit growers can do something that wheat growers can't: they can join a cooperative that tries to brand the fruit as somehow superior. Are Sunkist oranges any better than regular oranges? Who knows? But they do command a premium price.

Could cause marketing help commodity producers preserve some pricing power?

This sticker on a watermelon purchased at a local grocery store made me wonder.

The watermelon is called a 'Pink Ribbon Watermelon' from C.H. Robinson on Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and it promises to 'donate a portion of our sales to breast cancer organizations.'

The sticker seems like a half-effort to me that might not actually help C.H. Robinson preserve pricing power.

The 'portion of the proceeds' language is weak. People need more information than this from brands they don't know. Likewise, it would be better if the campaign specified a particular charity or charities. The pink ribbon alone isn't enough.

C.H. Robinson could also go cheeky with some kind of 'Save the Melons' campaign. Done right, that would generate all kinds of publicity.

Notable Articles on Cause Marketing from Self Magazine's GOOD Initiative

Self Magazine publishes periodic pieces on cause marketing as a part of its GOOD initiative.

The tent pole of GOOD is a consumer research study of 2,700 women that highlights the emotional impact that cause marketing can have, especially as compared to traditional marketing.

Here, then, are links to three articles from the GOOD newsletter archive that I find especially notable:

http://www.selfconnected.com/goodworks/0803/

http://www.selfconnected.com/goodworks/0806/

http://www.selfconnected.com/goodworks/newsletter/0711/

How Not to Design Your Own Cause Marketing Ad

Some people shouldn’t be allowed to do their own cause marketing advertising.

That’s what I thought after seeing this ad from the local franchisees for Window World, Doug and Kathy Llewellyn.

On the left half of the ad, about two-thirds of the way down are not one but three logos for causes: Window World Cares, the franchisor’s foundation, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and Veterans Airlift Command.

Three causes is probably two too many for their customers and prospects to understand and follow. Right now Window World Cares primarily supports St. Jude and Veterans Airlift Command. Which begs the question, if the other two are already on there, why put the WWC logo there as well?

But ignore all that for a moment and put yourself in the mindset of a Window World franchisee like the Llewellyns. If you were them and you still wanted to support multiple causes, wouldn’t want to know which cause pulls the best?

Print ads like this would allow them to do just that. This ad comes from a shopper-style magazine that is 32 pages of ads. The shopper comes in several different editions. So Window World Utah could easily test which charity performs the best in a head-to-head competition.

Worse, from my perspective as a cause marketer, the ad has not just the cause marketing, but also a testimonial from radio talk show host Dave Ramsey, seals from Good Housekeeping and Energy Star, and no less than two phone numbers, four URLS and six dollar-signs. Whew!

In this ad the franchise throws everything against the wall to see what sticks. Trouble is, when you throw the whole pot of spaghetti…water and all… against the wall, almost none of it is going to stick!

Cannes Lions Winners Hold Lessons for Cause Marketers

Last week at the 57th annual Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival fully one-third of the 12 Grand Prix awards were taken by two campaigns that were cause-based.

(If the math seems a little funny it’s because the two campaigns in question won Grand Prix awards in four separate categories).

Is this the most ever? Truthfully the Lions website was so slow moving on my side of the Internet that I couldn’t afford the time to double-check. But I think it’s safe to say that more of this is happening now than when the Festival launched back in 1953.

Why is that? And why did these two cause-driven campaigns vacuum up so many awards in Cannes?

I think we can stipulate that there are more causes now than in 1953 or even in the two-martini lunch days of 1963, when Mad Men’s agency ‘Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’ was active on Madison Avenue.

We can also stipulate that there are more media available to advertisers now than ever. Indeed, one of the winners was Wieden + Kennedy’s campaign for Livestrong, that developed a machine that re-imagines street advertising for the digital age. (See above).

But I think the real reason is that when there’s meaningful resources involved and a certain amount of creative license, it’s a lot more fun for an agency and its creatives to tackle a cause campaign than to develop another ad for McDonalds or Walgreens.

For proof you don’t have to look any further than the Ad Council, which had been enabling cause advertising since 1942. While plenty of schlock has come from the Ad Council over the years, they’ve also been responsible for some real gems, including Smokey the Bear, Rosie the Riveter, United Negro College Fund’s ‘A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste,’ McGruff the Crime Dog, and many more.

The first of the double-winners at this year’s Cannes Lions was Gatorade’s campaign Replay, which won for ‘Best Integrated Campaign’ and ‘Promo and Activation’ by creative agency TWBA\Chiat\Day LA.

Replay was a promotion meant to rekindle the athletic fires of men 30 or over. Statistics show that only 3 in 10 adults over the age of 30 exercise regularly. Put another way, demand for Gatorade is suffering because so many adults settle into sedentary lifestyles as they age.

So Gatorade sponsored the replay a high school football game between two longtime rivals in New Jersey that had ended in a soccer-style 7-7 tie on November 25, 1993.

Chiat\Day convinced players from both teams, their old head coaches, even the high school’s cheerleaders and band members to return to the field and settle the score. The players trained for two months and the game was played on a scorching hot day in 2009. (And, as Gatorade took pains to announce, there were no big injures and no heat exhaustion in the game.) The training and the lead-up to the game was edited into episodes and posted on the Internet.

The game itself sold out in 90-minutes and the campaign generated 160 million media impressions. A feature film is in development and a reality series based on the concept airs on Fox Sports Network.

The other double winner was Wieden + Kennedy, which won a Lion under the ‘Cyber’ category for Chalkbot, and a ‘Titanium and Integrated’ Lion and for Livestrong, Lance Armstrong’s cancer charity.

Chalkbot was an element of the Livestrong campaign, but was nonetheless awarded a separate Lion award.

The Livestrong campaign was based on Armstrong’s return to the Tour de France in 2009> Armstrong returned, in part, to raise money and awareness for the fight against cancer. Chalkbot’s part in that was to lay down inspirational messages on road surfaces in Livestrong’s signature yellow.

The yellow was chalk not paint and therefore degradable. The messages came from people in the United States and France who had texted them to the Livestrong website. During the month-long Tour de France, the chalkbot laid down more than 36,000 messages on the actual race course. As the images were laid down they were GPS-tagged and photographed to enable social media sharing through Facebook, Twitter and others.

It’s easy to see why these campaigns are winners. The Chalkbot, for instance, had to be invented from the ground up. And the text to message feature was genius.

Back in the day, the message of Replay… ‘get fit, old man’… was relegated to PSA campaigns of the type the Ad Council specializes in. But Replay is thousands of times more sticky than any standard-issue PSA. After all, who hasn’t known lament at events and choices from our earlier life? And who among us wouldn’t want to press the reset button to get a second crack at righting old regrets?

Not every cause campaign can or should be Cannes Lion award winner. Marketers with integrity should care more about results than awards. But for cause marketers the message from these two campaigns is; don’t settle for the ordinary.