Great marketing...

Sustainable advertising is funny.

Don't squeeze the Charmin...

As consumers become more and more numb to typically-blah advertising --even in contextually appropriate settings-- businesses are forced to speed up their hamster wheels in order to grab our attention. With varied statistics it's hard to tell how ad-saturated we really are, but this might give you an idea of what these ad execs are competing against:

The average American is exposed to 247 commercial messages each day. -Consumer Reports Website

Research tells us that the average American consumer is exposed tomore that 600 advertising messages a day in one form or another. -The Business Journal Phoenix

The average American is exposed to about 3000 advertising messages a day, and globally corporations spend over $620 billion each year to make their products seem desirable and to get us to buy them. -Michael Brower, PhD, and Warren Leon, PhD, Union of Concerned Scientists

A conservative estimate has the average American consumer exposed to more than 850 commercial messages a day. -Texas A&M University Digital Library

As a result, socially conscience and devilishly interactive advertising has been begun to break the marketing atmosphere, shattering the mold in order to evoke a consumer emotion far deeper than the buy me.

While more and more attention is being garnered by these organizations, big corporations are beginning to take notice. Check out these innovative advertisements by non-profits, governments, and social organizations, with a few green-washed billboards thrown in (see: McDonald's).

Click for bigger.

Cancer Patient Aid Association ceiling poster campaign:

For Amnesty International:

For The Salvation Army:

For Denver Water's "Use Only What You Need" Campaign:

For The Red Cross (with various other locations):

For the Focus 12 Rehab Center:

For a deforestation campaign (similar to WWF campaign pic below*)

For The World Wildlife Fund:


For Medicine Without Borders (one of my FAVORITES):

For endabuse.org

For a Stop Smoking Campaign in South America:

For a Greenpeace Global Warming campaign (incudes various other cities):

For Mothers Against Drunk Driving:

For the World Wildlife Fund:

*For the World Wildlife Fund:

Award-winning solar-powered billboard for NedBank in South Africa:

For the always-healthy McDonald's:

Cut-Outs for the Bronx Zoo:

For Amnesty International:

For Institute Akatu in Brazil:

For more information, check out adsoftheworld.com

Sorry Bill Hicks, but there is (some) brilliance in advertising...

There is a large, gaping black part of me that adheres to the to the sticky stand-up of Bill Hicks (NSFW: LANGUAGE), loathing every ounce of advertising and every microdrop of marketing therein. The dirt and grime of the bad marketing seems to always absorb every ounce of the good. But on some very rare occasions something will be so beautiful - be it tragic beauty, visual beauty, fluid or otherwise - that it'll knock me on my wallet faster than a Disaronno on the rocks (Its warm and sensual taste makes me wish it would never end).*

German agency Kolle Rebbe Werbeagentur GmbH won a prestigious Black Pencil Award in the Illustration category at the D&AD Global Awards for its “War Orphans - Somalia, Iraq, Chechnya” posters. Designed for Misereor Charity, the posters are visually commanding, demanding your imagination to stretch beyond the painted steel and cement and visualize the fractured lives of those in war torn areas.

Somalia:

Iraq:

Chechnya :

In this day and age, the one characteristic consistently lacking in advertising is the message. Or maybe it's not so much that the message is lacking, but the fact that contemporary advertising never fails to distort. Although in this instance the work is (unfortunately) beautiful, these posters are not just intended to attract the eye. It, instead, travels beyond the aesthetic, concentrating the message and conveying an uncensored emotion: not to buy a Coke because you're hip and young, or drive a truck because "This is our country," but to feel that there is not a difference between a bullet hole in a painted picture and a bullet hole in a person. The bone becomes the cement.

How often do you feel when you watch television? How do you usually feel when the marketing execs tell you how you're feeling?

If you felt anything, I encourage you to check out Misereor's work.

From their website:

MISEREOR was founded in 1958 as an agency "against hunger and disease in the world". In its capacity as the overseas development agency of the Catholic Church in Germany, it offers to cooperate in a spirit of partnership with all people of goodwill to promote development, fight worldwide poverty, liberate people from injustice, exercise solidarity with the poor and the persecuted, and help create "One World".

To fight the causes of hardship and misery as manifested chiefly in countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the forms of hunger, disease, poverty and other forms of human suffering...-

Thus enabling the people affected to lead a life of human dignity, and to promote justice, freedom, reconciliation and peace in the world.

The assistance we provide is designed to stimulate and support self-help and pave the way for sustainable improvement in the living conditions of the poor.

*I am not, in any way, endorsing this horrible commercial. I do, however, endorse the use of dark liquors.

They're GOOD videos...

A quick timewaster to start the day...

I've extolled the virtues of GOOD magazine many times before, but I was suprised to learn that the philanthropic print publication has a plethora of videos online. For those of you familiar with Current TV (I, myself, am tivodicted to the channel), GOOD gives their videos a similar flavor. The facts are short and sweet, the graphics are appealing, and the stories are interesting.

Here are some to get you started. If you get addicted, check out the rest of them here.