The Cause-Marketing panel is calling on advertising professionals to take social-cause marketing efforts to the next level and devise novel ways of helping mobilize the international community to end, among other things, the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region.
For generations the creative advertising industry has been pegged as the communicators of sleaze. The creative advertising industry has made a lot of their money providing services to clients considered to have “shady products”, such as alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, sex, violence, and materialism. The past 5-10 years the paradigm of those who work in the creative advertising industry have began to come about-face, and prove otherwise…
Ads can do, at least, as much good
The creative advertising industry paradigm is taking a socially responsible shift. No longer are creative advertising professionals allowing themselves to be profiled as an invader. Creative advertising professionals now view themselves as holding the capacity to cause change, and particularly a change for the better. Creative advertising can make you feel warm and fuzzy about a piece of candy, so why not the same about the effort to cure AIDS in Africa, or yes, genocide in the Darfur region.
Hard to communicate Cause Marketing Messages
“At first blush, it might seem like a subject like genocide would be simple to communicate,” said David Mitchell, partner at GMMB. But NGOs are challenged to create [creative] advertising campaigns that can convey the full scope of the atrocities, without the use of graphic images or footage, which typically don’t pass standards for TV and print appropriateness
Social-cause marketers also must careful to not sensationalize events such as Darfur, said David Tobey, senior VP and creative director at advocacy-focused ad agency GMMB. Sensationalism can cause a campaign to lose credibility.
Harnessing the power of celebrities is one way to generate a demand for action for Darfur and other social causes, as they are “major-league advertising hot shots,” noted John Prendergast, founder of the Enough project to abolish genocide and other mass atrocities.
As part of the panel, the Save Darfur Coalition and GMMB, presented the strategy and creative work behind its domestic and international advertising campaigns.
Robin Raj, founder and creative director of the Citizen Group, shared the making of the “Instant Karma” Darfur benefit album released earlier this year and a new website, eyesondarfur.org, which uses high-resolution satellite imagery to illustrate the reality of the situation there.
Additional Cause-Marketing and Advertising Examples:
Being discussed on AdBeef is gun crime. Ask yourself, what and how would I communicate to people their need to be aware of and help change the amount of gun crime throughout the world? See how Choice-FM chose to do it with their Choice-FM Gun Crime commercial, and give them your feedback.
See how a group of students at Brigham Young University and the Office of National Drug Control Policy tried combating teen drug and substance abuse: Rugby, Artist