Cool Cause Marketing Campaigns from Two Commonwealth Countries

Two cool new cause marketing concepts from two different Commonwealth countries.

From New Zealand Donate your Desktop invites people to download a little software to their desktop computer. Included in the download is permission to push a different ad to your desktop’s background every day. Proceeds from the ad sales benefit the charity of your choice.

“Think of it as renting out your desktop background as an advertising space,” says Donate Your Desktop’s website, “with the proceeds going to charity.”

The ads tend to be ‘Bing’-like with big and bold visuals.

This is ‘push’ media made palatable by the addition of the cause marketing element. Wikipedia defines push media as, “… a style of Internet-based communication where the request for a given transaction is initiated by the publisher or central server. It is contrasted with pull, where the request for the transmission of information is initiated by the receiver or client.”

Ten years ago push media was the ‘once and future king’ of the Internet, but it was always a little creepy and never took off. For Donate Your Desktop cause marketing helps mitigate the negatives of push media.

So far Donate Your Desktop is for New Zealanders only, although I suspect there’s an opening here using a similar cause marketing approach to push ads to mobile devices like iPads and Kindles.

The Canadian beer giant Molson offers a promotion that allows patrons to get access to special concerts, while planting trees and cleaning up parks. Called Red Leaf Project, Molson is distributing more than 1 million beer coasters made of seed paper that, given the right conditions, will grow a tree.

The coasters are distributed at bars and with each crate of Molson Canadian sold. On each coaster is a pin code. Enter the code at the Molson website and you’re entered for a chance to win tickets to an outdoor concert near your postal code.

As an inducement, Molson is offering to carve out part of a $400,000 pot of money towards the restoration of parks near your postal code. People who participate in the park restorations/cleanups also get a shot at tickets to regional concerts. At the left is Molson’s 2012 TV ad for the campaign.

In 2011 the Red Leaf Project resulted in the planting of 110,00 trees and collection of 2000 bags of litter. (The count of bags of litter collected gives you sense about how clean Canada is).

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