Cause Marketing

With National Breast Cancer Awareness Month behind us, is not too soon to start talking about cause marketing and the next big holiday coming up, namely Super Bowl 2013. Rudolph Foods, which bills itself as the world’s largest manufacturer of pork rinds is celebrating Pork Rind Appreciation Day on Super Bowl Sunday, with a modest cause marketing campaign that features an oversized ambition. When you buy a package of Rudolph pork rinds, the company will make a $0.10 donation to Gridiron Greats, a nonprofit that provides medical and financial help to former NFL players and their families in dire need. The modest part is that the donation is capped at $10,000. That needs to be a bigger number. But I very much admire Rudolph Food’s ambition. Snack foods are a big part of the Super Bowl. But you could chew your way through a lot of advertising dollars trying to keep pace with the likes of Frito-Lay, the $13 billion snack foods division of PepsiCo. Heck, in its press releases Rudolph can’t...

It’s conference tournament time in college basketball in the lead-up to March Madness, the best sporting event in America other than the Super Bowl. Soon the NCAA Tournament seedings will be announced and brackets will start rolling off of office printers nationwide. In homage to the Madness, here’s a cause marketing promotion you could run next year in conjunction with the Tournament. It features local celebrities, a sweepstakes component, and numerous possible extensions. Here’s how it could work: local celebrities are pitted against each other in something like a NCAA Tournament bracket. Then people vote on who they’d like to see advance based on the parings on Facebook or at the website. If there’s no seedings, it’s basically a straight popularity contest. The person who picks the most brackets correctly wins a cool prize; perhaps tickets to March Madness. Local businesses are the sponsors of the brackets. In addition to selling the brackets, you’ll need to get permission in your m...

In the moments and hours after the Super Bowl advertising executives appear like earthworms after a rainstorm to grade and critique the television ads. Never mind that very few of these experts have ever actually produced a Super Bowl ad, much less one that would pass muster with their equally critical peers! So not one more word on the 2012 Super Bowl ads, at least from me. Instead I want to raise the banner for a kind of cause marketing I’d like to see actually develop. The idea was prompted by a trip to Walgreens when I purchased a paper icon benefiting the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. At the bottom of the Walgreen receipt there was a website toll-free phone number. Dial the number, answer some questions and you’re entered into a drawing for $10,000. Other companies that do this direct you to a website URL. I don’t know what their response rate is, but the $10,000 amount suggests that it’s pretty low. Taco Bell’s survey gives out $1,000 per week. At a regional seafood rest...

I love sports and I love athletes and it’s been my pleasure to be around Heisman Trophy winners, two-sport legends, Super Bowl MVPs, NBA 7-footers, and first-round draft picks, all in charitable settings. I’ve even got an autograph from futbol marvel Pele. Smart sports agents try to get their athletes involved with causes because it helps broaden their appeal. Not that they necessarily need it. In certain pro sports towns (as well as at all the SEC schools!) highly-paid athletes stroll around among us like demigods down from Olympus. For instance, I can all but guarantee that Ben Roethlisberger, the controversial Super Bowl-winning quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers, has never bought his own drink in Steeltown. A Pittsburgh-area cause that can entice Big Ben to support them with his presence is all but assured of selling out that event. But just 300 miles away in Philadelphia or 250 miles away in Cleveland, Roethlisberger couldn’t get a cab at the airport or sell his signe...

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...

The September 27, 2007 Forbes magazine listed the value of the world’s top sponsored sports events, by the amount of money they generate per day. They are: Super Bowl… $336 million Summer Olympics…$176 million Fifa World Cup…$103 million NCAA Men’s Final Four…$90 million Winter Olympics…$82 million Rose Bowl…$72 million MLB World Series…$61 million Kentucky Derby…$59 million 9. NBA Finals…$58 million I notice that your nonprofit isn’t on the list. Indeed, no nonprofit is. There’s two reasons for that. Forbes compiled a list of the top sports event sponsorships. I’ll get to the second reason in a second. But cause marketing is… in the main… just a form of sponsorship. Why isn’t your cause making a $336 million per day like the Super Bowl? Think of all the advantages your cause enjoys. It has tremendous heart. It has a list of supporters who literally open their wallets for you several times a year. Some of your supporters are as passionate about your cause as any face-painting fan of...

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 ...

In time for Super Bowl 45 and its $100,000-a-second ads, Haberman , a media and marketing agency in Minneapolis has unveiled Add or Delete, a website and (potentially) a movement meant to persuade the global ad/marketing/PR agencies to donate 5% of the $500 billion annual global advertising budget to benefit global good. 5% of $500 billion would be $25 billion a year... the Super Bowl of Cause Marketing. That's a lot of scratch. But the numbers get big mighty fast when talking about the Super Bowl. According to Haberman, a 30-second Super Bowl ad costs $1 million for production alone and another $3 million to air, meaning that Fox will gross something like $270 million for the 2011 game alone. In the last 20 years more than $2.7 billon has been spent on Super Bowl advertising. Here’s what Haberman is suggesting. Go to the Add or Delete site on Facebook , a kind of ‘Hot or Not’ site for advertisements. If an ad inspires and delights, add it. If not, delete it. The sub rosa intent ...

An open letter to my friends in the nonprofit world. Dear Nonprofit Marketer: The Super Bowl was yesterday. It attracted the largest TV audience for any TV show ever in the United States with 106.5 million viewers. The Winter Olympics are a few days away. The World Cup is about 4 months from now. So I'm opening up Peabody's Way Back Machine to a post I wrote in 2007 that asks, 'why doesn't your cause generate as much money as any of those sports properties?' Short answer; it's a failure of imagination. The September 27, 2007 Forbes listed the value of the world’s top sponsored sports events, by the amount of money they generate per day. They are: 1. Super Bowl… $336 million 2. Summer Olympics…$176 million 3. Fifa World Cup…$103 million 4. NCAA Men’s Final Four…$90 million 5. Winter Olympics…$82 million 6. Rose Bowl…$72 million 7. MLB World Series…$61 million 8. Kentucky Derby…$59 million 9. NBA Finals…$58 million I notice that your nonprofit isn’t on the list....

An open letter to my friends in the nonprofit world. Dear Nonprofit Cause Marketer: The September 27 Forbes listed the value of the world’s top sponsored sports events, by the amount of money they generate per day. They are: 1. Super Bowl… $336 million 2. Summer Olympics…$176 million 3. Fifa World Cup…$103 million 4. NCAA Men’s Final Four…$90 million 5. Winter Olympics…$82 million 6. Rose Bowl…$72 million 7. MLB World Series…$61 million 8. Kentucky Derby…$59 million 9. NBA Finals…$58 million I notice that your nonprofit isn’t on the list. Indeed, no nonprofit is. There’s two reasons for that. Forbes compiled a list of the top sports event sponsorships. I’ll get to the second reason in a second. But cause-related marketing is… in the main… just a form of sponsorship. Why isn’t your cause making a $103 million per day like the World Cup? Think of all the advantages you enjoy. You have tremendous heart. You have a list of supporters who literally open their wallets for you several times ...

The Devil (in the Red Dress) is in the Details I was at Rite Aid yesterday and bought a paper red dress for $1. It’s a small part of the American Heart Association’s admirably ambitious Go Red for Women campaign going on right now during "heart month." Heart Disease, not breast cancer, is the number one killer of women. So to take some of the steam out of the many breast cancer charities, the Heart Association is doing for February what the breast cancer charities have done for October; brand it as their own. And so, on the air, in retail outlets of all kinds, at events, in the print and electronic media Go Red for Women is almost omnipresent in the United States. For instance, you can buy a Go Red themed book called “ Kiss & Tell ” in Macys stores. Kellogg’s has specially-packaged boxes of their breakfast cereal Smart Start in stores now. The jeweler Swarovski has a Go Red pendant on sale. Rite Aid … with 3325 stores in 27 states… and Key Bank … with 950 branches in ...