Cause Marketing

Unless you subscribe to some publication like the Army Times or Aviation Week and Space Technology , or you frequent the Yellow or Blue lines of the Washington D.C. Metro subway on the Virginia side of the Potomac, chances are you don’t often see much advertising from military contractors. But this is Christmas. And to hear Lockheed Martin tell it, sometimes Santa himself needs their C-130 aircraft to see that needy kids have toys to play with come Christmas Day. The ad features Lockheed Martin employees supporting Toys for Tots, a charitable effort of the US Marine Corp Reserve. With revenues of $47 billion in 2010, Lockheed Martin is one of the largest defense contractors in the world with specialties in aircraft, missiles, and spacecraft. On the left side of the ad you see a photo of a row of C-130s, which the company has produced since the 1950s. Quoting a Mother Jones article, Wikipedia says that Lockheed received 7 percent of all the funds paid out by the Pentagon in 2009. I ...