Cause Marketing… um… Magic

After a show in Palm Beach Florida in April 2006, David Copperfield and two companions were mugged at gunpoint by three assailants who asked for the magician’s wallet. Instead, Copperfield performed a sleight of hand, palming his wallet, phone and passport while turning out his pockets to suggest that he didn’t have anything to steal.

We have something like a sleight of hand going on with this ad for Clorox Bleach. It looks like cause marketing, with a dot.org website, something that looks like a nonprofit logo, and a mission to stop an eradicable tree disease, but in fact, there’s no cause marketing here.

This ad is from the Dec-Jan. 2009 issue of Parenting magazine and it’s the first of three consecutive pages of ads for Clorox Bleach. The headline reads: “Saving Trees Big and Small: Clorox Regular Bleach.

The art shows an ornament hanging from an evergreen branch. The body copy suggests that using Clorox Bleach to kill bacteria in water will prolong the life of live Christmas trees.

Ignore for a moment that the premise of the headline… ‘saving trees’… is a logical nonstarter since before a Christmas tree enters you home it has to be cut down first!

Concentrate instead on the column on the right that mentions that the State of California uses bleach-treated water to treat oak trees in the state suffering from a disease called Sudden Oak Death. So the bleach that the cash-strapped State uses to combat Sudden Oak Death comes as an in-kind donation from Clorox, right?

Who can say? The copy reads: “To help stop the disease from spreading, water used by the California Department of Forestry and nurseries is treated with bleach.”

Hm. Does that mean Clorox bleach or the house brand at Safeway?

The body copy continues, “The Clorox Company is providing funding to support tree planting efforts around the state. For more information about California oaks, go to www.californiaoaks.org.”

So, then, Clorox pays the Oakland nonprofit called the California Oak Foundation to plant California oaks around the Golden State?

Not so fast. The California Oak Foundation is not a tree-planting charity, it’s an environmental advocacy group. I checked the Foundation’s website and 990s (tax returns) and it doesn’t appear that Clorox makes donations, at least for tree planting, to the California Oak Foundation.

This ad is all legerdemain.

Like David Copperfield to look at The Clorox Company you’d think there’d be some money there. And there is. The Clorox Company made $5.44 billion last year. Its market cap is $8.49 billion and its EBITDA was $1.29 billion.

But just as you won’t figure out how David Copperfield makes the Statue of Liberty disappear by watching more closely the distracting sleight of hand, this ad won’t tell you anything about how The Clorox Company really “saves trees.”

Cause Marketing: The All Packaging Edition

One way to activate a cause marketing campaign when the sponsor sells a physical product is on the packaging. I started my career in cause marketing on the charity side and I can tell you that back in the day we were thrilled to get a logo on pack of a consumer packaged good (CPG) or even just a mention. Since then, there’s been a welcome evolution of what sponsors are willing and able to do with their packaging in order to activate their cause sponsorships. That said, even today some sponsors don’t seem to have gotten the memo that when it comes to explaining your cause campaign, more really is more, even on something as small as a can or bottle. The savviest sponsors realize that their only guaranteed means of reaching actual customers with a cause marketing message is by putting it on packaging. And the reach and frequency of the media on packaging for certain high-volume CPG items is almost certainly greater than radio, print or outdoor advertising, and, in many cases, TV. More to

Why Even Absurd Cause-Related Marketing Has its Place

Buy a Bikini, Help Cure Cancer New York City (small-d) fashion designer Shoshonna Lonstein Gruss may have one of the more absurd cause-related marketing campaigns I’ve come across lately. When you buy the bikini or girls one-piece swimsuit at Bergdorf-Goodman in New York shown at the left all sales “proceeds” benefit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center . Look past the weak ‘ proceeds ’ language, which I always decry, and think for a moment about the incongruities of the sales of swimsuits benefiting the legendary Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Cancer has nothing to do swimming or swimsuits or summering in The Hamptons for that matter. And it’s not clear from her website why Shoshanna, the comely lass who once adorned the arm of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, has chosen the esteemed cancer center to bestow her gifts, although a web search shows that she’s supported its events for years. Lesser critics would say that the ridiculousness of it all is a sign that cause-related marketing is

A Clever Cause Marketing Campaign from Snickers and Feeding America

Back in August I bought this cause-marketed Snickers bar during my fourth trip of the day to Home Depot. (Is it even possible to do home repairs and take care of all your needs with just one trip to Home Depot / Lowes ?) Here’s how it works: Snickers is donating the cost of 2.5 million meals to Feeding America, the nation’s leading hunger-relief charity. On the inside of the wrapper is a code. Text that code to 45495… or enter it at snickers.com… and Snickers will donate the cost of one meal to Feeding America, up to one million additional meals. The Feeding America website says that each dollar you donate provides seven meals. So Snickers donation might be something like $500,000. But I like that Snickers quantified its donations in terms of meals made available, rather than dollars. That’s much more concrete. It doesn’t hurt that 3.5 million is a much bigger number than $500,000. I also like the way they structured the donation. By guaranteeing 2.5 million meals, the risk of a poor

Cause Marketing

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