Cause Marketing

In the May 2013 and June 2013 issues of Outside magazine CamelBak ran an ad for its new All Clear water-purifying bottle that looks for all the world like cause marketing. But it isn’t. It depicts a photojournalist-style picture of Garrett Means, wearing scrubs and identified in the body copy as a humanitarian aid worker. To his left is a black woman holding an All Clear bottle. The body copy continues; “the Tanzanian village that Garrett visited didn’t have any potable water. He used the CamelBak All Clear for all his personal water and taught the locals how to use it before he left.” CamelBak All Clear bottles use UV light to treat .75 liters of water. You fill the $100 bottle with clear water, press the button for two seconds which activates the UV lamp and then shake it for 60 seconds so that the UV light gets to all the water in the bottle. The bottle has a lithium-ion battery in it that’s good for about 80 cycles before it has to be recharged. You can recharge it using a U...

One of the infuriating things about the pink ribbon, emblematic of the fight against breast cancer, is that no one owns it in the United States. Consequently you get really silly things like pink sex toys and pink-labeled watermelon and pick pocketknives and more insidious stuff like these collectible ornaments that were advertised in Sunday's Courier Journal newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky that are a clear and unambiguous case of pinkwashing. Shouldn’t we just get rid of the mess and the chaos and just assign ownership of the pink ribbon to one charity and be done with it, much the way the trademark to the pink ribbon in Canada is owned by the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation? In a word, no. Here’s why: It’s very clear to me that the pink ribbon brand is much bigger because no one entity owns it than it would be if one entity did. Consider the case of the Android operating system which is in more smart phones than Apple’s OS or RIM’s OS, mostly because Google gives licenses aw...

In my ongoing effort to identify and root out faux cause marketing I came across this ad in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database from Church & Dwight , makers of Arm & Hammer baking soda products, including, in this case, Feline Pine kitty litter. The ad depicts militant beret-wearing cats fronted by ‘Che Gato ,’ paws of fury raised against clay kitty litter, and the attendant dust, perfumes, and harsh chemicals. Che Gato is even looking left of the camera's perspective, like the iconic picture of Che Guevara . The headline rages Karl Marx-style ‘Cats of the World Rejoice, We Now Have a Better Choice!’ Placards raised by other protesting cats declare, ‘We Want Feline Pine,’ and ‘We Are C.A.C.’ And that’s where the faux cause marketing comes into play. There’s a website with a dot-org extension; catsagainstclay.org. Now any of us could go and register an available dot-org extension. It’s not like ICANN, the official registrar of top-level Internet domain extensions, chec...

My post from yesterday, April 4, 2011 chronicled my top 10 list of the best cause marketing of 2010 . Today’s post is my list of the 10 worst cause marketing campaigns of 2010 that I posted on during the year. Cause marketing campaigns land on the worst list because they lack transparency, they use bad judgment, are dishonest, overly-complicated, obtuse, or there’s just something weaselly about them. Just as my favorite campaign in yesterday's post was at the bottom, my my least favorite effort is at the bottom of this page. 1) I certainly thought there was something weaselly about a 2009 campaign from Clorox , which originally dropped in Parenting magazine in December 2009. The ad was ostensibly about saving trees. The art in the ad depicted a Christmas tree. But Clorox wasn’t saving Christmas trees. It mentioned tree-planting and a charity called the California Oak Foundation. But California Oak Foundation wasn’t a tree-planting group. Instead, I wrote, “This ad is all legerdemai...

Holy crap, what was Groupon thinking?! The upstart online marketer airs an ad that starts out looking like an homage to the people and culture of Tibet and it turns out to be actor Timothy Hutton looking smarmy and paying half price at a Chicago Tibetan restaurant thanks to Groupon. (Groupon produced a second ad with a save the whales theme and featuring Cuba Gooding Jr. It was no better.) Groupon’s Tibet ad somehow managed to be tasteless, inane, and insulting at the same time. The airtime alone costs $3 million in the high-stakes world of Super Bowl advertising. But that’s the smallest cost to Groupon. Instead the private company just erased millions of dollars in brand equity in one 30-second ad. This was faux cause marketing at its most reckless. When Groupon turned down Google’s reported $5 billion buyout offer, many scratched their heads. When the company, which is making money hand over fist, decided to run a Super Bowl ad some analysts chalked it up to tech-company sock-puppet...

In the past year I’ve profiled what I call ‘faux cause marketing.’ It’s marketing that looks or sounds like cause marketing, but in fact no cause benefits from it. At left is a small ad that ran in the back of Golf Digest magazine in October 2009, Breast Cancer Awareness Month. There’s the familiar pink ribbon, emblematic of breast cancer causes. But look closely and you’ll see that the company makes no claims about any charity benefiting from the sale of pink ribbon golf club covers. Although I found the same clubheads on the company’s website, I couldn’t find any evidence of support for breast cancer causes. If indeed the company sells the pink ribbon clubhead covers without any remuneration to breast cancer charities then the ad is unethical in my book and I pronounce a pox on their business. A kind of faux cause marketing with a sense of humor can be seen from AirTran , the discount airline. Both the two-color ads on the left, which ran in the same issue of Sports Illustrated ...

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 ...

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 fo...