Cause Marketing

Uh-oh! Your A-list celebrity supporter just pulled a Tiger and embarrassed himself and his family on a tape first seen on TMZ and now airing on every screen on the planet. It seems like everywhere they point a camera, someone new is coming forward to say that they, too, did something appalling with your alpha celebrity. (Cue Karl Malden VO) “ What will you do? What will you do? " Fire him? Disavow? Stand by her for as long as you can stand the heat? A new study by Harris Poll suggests that maybe you do nothing. Although there is a veritable cottage industry of celebrity trackers waiting for them to step outside without any makeup, or look less than flattering in their bikini, or utter a drunken calumny, or run over a paparazzi in their Mercedes, maybe none of that matters. An Adweek Media/Harris Interactive Poll published Monday finds that three-quarters of Americans don’t impute any of the blame or think negatively of your brand as a result of your endorsers’ indiscretions. Conc...

College students are tricky to reach nowadays with traditional media. Unlike previous generations they refuse to take their medicine and watch a lot of network TV from 8pm to 11pm like their predecessors. Oh they consume media like a retired sumo wrestler eats carbs at an all you can eat buffet. But if you don’t have a message that’s well suited for their cell phones or i-Pods, or that they can mashup on their Facebook page or blog, or if it doesn’t work as a sponsored billboard in Grand Theft Auto then good luck reaching them in a meaningful way. One approach that consistently works is cause-related marketing and other elements of corporate social responsibility. This fact was underscored in the findings of a survey of college students published last week by Alloy Media + Marketing and conducted in April of 2007 by Harris Interactive. Alloy Media + Marketing, a New York City-based provider of ‘non-traditional media programs,’ developed a list of the top 10 “Most Socially Responsible ...