Cause Marketing

Cause marketing, like all forms of sponsorship, requires activation, or promotion of the campaign in some form. Imagine, then, how sweet it is when you sign one or more members of the media as a campaign sponsor. It’s a little like coming home every night to Giselle Bundchen (or, if you prefer, Tom Brady). Too bad the media sponsor in this effort benefiting the Red Dress campaign didn’t take a few extra steps to ensure that the campaign had a second life. The Red Dress Awards have been sponsored for the last eight years by Woman’s Day magazine, the Hachette Filipacci title with a circulation of almost 4 million readers. The Red Dress campaign is a sprawling effort held each February to raise awareness of heart disease among woman. Heart disease is far and away the deadliest killer of women in the United States. Red Dress efforts are spearheaded jointly, but separately by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association . In 2010 the Red Dress Awards benefited th...

If you haven’t heard by now, Mark Zuckerberg , the bare-faced billionaire founder of Facebook just gave the school system in Newark $100 million! He’s been all over the media…old and new…starting with a guest-shot on Oprah (view at left). On October 2 I will give 100-millionth as much to LIVESTRONG …Lance Armstrong’s anti-cancer charity… thanks to RadioShack . And thanks to RadioShack you can look for my picture in Times Square this coming Saturday as proof. Here’s how it works: On RadioShack's Team28 website you can enable a gadget to put a 28Badge over your Twitter or Facebook picture. The 28 references the 28 million people worldwide with cancer. By September 17 more than 20,000 pictures had been uploaded. On October 2…‘LIVESTRONG Day’ Military Island in Times Square in New York will display all the pictures collected during that 24-hour period. For every 28Badge added on LIVESTRONG DAY, RadioShack will donate $1, up to $100,000. I like it! Although I wish RadioShack would ha...

If you're anything like me then you've watched the growth and development of Lance Armstrong's LIVESTRONG brand with a mixture of awe and envy. It started with the iconic yellow rubber bracelets, which since 2004 have generated more than $70 million for the Lance Armstrong Foundation . Over the arc of the bracelet's popularity they have been imitated, parodied and worn by vast array of non-biking celebrities, as well as the hoi polloi. All guided by the legendary marketers at Nike and its long-time agency Weiden+Kennedy . So popular and well-known was the yellow bracelet that there was a long while when it seemed like every fundraising brainstorming session I had with a charity somebody suggested a bracelet campaign, as if lightning could be caught in a bottle a second time. (In that way it's reminiscent of all the meetings I've been in when people suggested that all they needed to really get their pet project off the ground was an appearance on Oprah !) From...

Mash up a telethon, the nationwide live showing of an earnest documentary film about three women fighting poverty in their respective countries, CARE , ONE, Fathom, and Twitter, and what do you get? We've seen local and regional Tweet-a-Thons, but this will apparently be the first-ever nationwide sponsored Tweet-a-Thon. From Tuesday, March 3 to Thursday March 5 when you Twitter with the phrase “#apowerfulnoise” in your Tweet, National CineMedia Fathom will make a $0.10 donation per CARE, up to 5 0,000  tweets, a rather modest $5,000.  The event culminates on Thursday, March 5 with the showing of the film “A Powerful Noise” at 450 movie theaters across the United States . The film will be followed by a live panel discussion that includes the likes of Christy Turlington Burns, Nicholas Kristof, Dr Helene Gayle, Madeleine Albricht, and Natalie Portman. You can submit a question to the panel here . The documentary was produced by Sheila Johnson, a Global Ambassador for CARE, an...

Drew Barrymore for the United Nations World Food Programme I can see it now. In the wake of a string of natural disasters and skyrocketing food prices in the Developing World, management at UN World Food Programme (WFP) decide to commence some serious marketing. So they start taking meetings with fancy ad agencies. Here’s how the successful meeting went: The senior manager at the agency turned on the charm and created a “ reality distortion field ” before turning the time over to the creative director, who immediately started to weave a persuasive narrative. “We’ll put actresses like Rachel Weisz and Drew Barrymore in PSAs, in print ads and on Oprah . Imagine stark, beautifully-shot images of Drew feeding darling doe-eyed kids in Kenya in haunting black and white. The images will underscore that issue of hunger in the Developing World is black and white…” At that point the UN World Food Programme managers should have kicked that agency to the curb. Unless your cause is the Ansel Adams...

Of a sudden one of the hottest marketing concepts around is ‘free.’ But is free sustainable or even possible for organizations that are already not-for-profit? I’ll tackle that question in Thursday’s post. But first, what is ‘free’? On a recent show, Oprah told her viewers that Suze Orman’s book Women and Money could be downloaded for free from Oprah’s site for 33 hours. During that time 1.1 million copies were downloaded in English and another 19,000 in Spanish. The graphic above… from TitleZ via the blog longtail.com … shows that sales of the book on Amazon improved dramatically after the giveaway. That example comes from author Chris Anderson, who says that Free is being driven by the declining costs of digital processing, storage and bandwidth. Anderson, who is the editor of Wired magazine and the author of influential book “The Long Tail,” has another book coming out soon on the business value of giving it away for free . What other examples are there? Google, which gives away ...