Cause Marketing

The thing you never understand about the Grand Canyon, until you actually go there, is that no photo does it justice. It’s so deep and so wide that the limited field of view provided by still or video cameras comes up seriously wanting. And no photo, by itself, is immersive enough either. Now Nature Valley granola bars, a General Mills brand, is trying to do justice to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Great Smokey National Parks by letting you experience them as a virtual hiker. Nature Valley and its agency McCann Erickson sent camera crews to capture 100 or so trail miles in each park using much the same technology that Google does for its famed street views on Google Maps, only all the equipment was mounted on people, not vehicles. In February 2012 Nature Valley will unveil the first stage online. And you and I can follow along at a real-time walking pace. Writes Joe Berkowitz on FastCompany.com , “the resulting concept…is a model for how marketers can make a useful contribution to...

The water business used to be a pretty sweet deal. You package water, which might have come from a municipal source, for a fraction of a penny per gallon and you sell it in individual plastic bottles for dollars per quart. Best of all, people need to drink gallons of water a week just to survive. All you needed was a cool bottle and a fancy brand and the distribution to match and you were in business. And then the world began to wake up to the silliness and waste of bottled water. There’s no need to recount the ridiculousness of it all or even cite sources. We all know about that ginormous plastic island floating in the Pacific Ocean. We all know about the crazy amounts of landfill space going just to water bottles that won’t ever degrade. We all sense the folly of water being shipped from Fuji (or even New York) to your store in Texas or California or Minnesota. It would be easy to defend if water was bad in all those places. Only it’s not. In most of North America, Europe, Australia,...