KitKats, gotta love em. Each bar consists of fingers composed of three layers of crème-filled wafer, covered in an outer layer of chocolate. Each finger can be snapped from the bar one at a time. It is not just a chocolate bar; it is a way of living. Who did not ‘have a break’ eating a KitKat?
Apparently the orangutans in the rainforests of Indonesia are not that fond of the chocolate treats. Greenpeace holds Nestlé – the producer of KitKat - responsible for destroying rainforests to get cheap palm oil, a key ingredient of the chocolate bar. The rainforests are also the natural habitat of the orangutan and having a break while your own home is destructed is pretty difficult.
Today Greenpeace released a commercial in the typical KitKat style in order to raise awareness among the consumers of KitKat and to ask them to give the orangutan his well deserved break. It is a pretty in-your-face video in which the chocolate fingers of the KitKat turn out to be the fingers of the orangutan and the crème-filling is its blood. Bon appétit!
In general I am not a fan of the use of shock advertising in the social sector, because it seems to have lost its effect a long time ago. In this case I do like the video, because the message is not only direct, but it also takes away your appetite. The association of the orangutan’s hairy and bloody finger with this chocolate bar will make me think twice when I need a break.
Besides that the video’s direct style fits an organization like Greenpeace and the fact that it is a spoof on a KitKat commercial gives it an interesting mix of humor and seriousness.
Don’t just give the orangutan a break, but stop Nestlé from destroying rainforests for palm oil. You can read more and take action by clicking here.
Update 19.30u: It seems the campaign has certain effect and the PR machine of Nestlé started to work as well. This afternoon they released a press message stating:
“Nestlé has replaced the Indonesian company Sinar Mas as a supplier of palm oil with another supplier for further shipments. We confirm that Nestlé has only bought from Sinar Mas for manufacturing in Indonesia, and no palm oil bought from Sinar Mas has been used by Nestlé for manufacturing in any other country. We have also joined other major purchasers of palm oil in making sure that companies, such as Cargill, understand our demands for palm oil which is not sourced from suppliers which destroy rainforests.”
YouTube deleted the video after complaints of Nestlé and has now been uploaded to Vimeo. Greenpeace continues its actions, because according to them Nestlé only stopped working with small suppliers of palm oil. To be continued.
Meet Google. The noun that became a verb. The world’s favourite search engine, and the company whose motto is “Don’t be evil...”
Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Graphics by Patrick Clair, written by Elmo Keep and Jon Casimir.
To promote the Earth HourWWF Belgium called in the help from the dark side. On Saturday 27 March 2010 at 8.30pm they want a billion people around the world to switch off their lights for one hour. Belgian agency Germaine created together with Pimpz a fun video explaining the participation of Darth Vader to involve a young audience. He is not such a bad guy, but a normal family man just facing some image problems. Together with the video they created a website making great use of the different social networks. You can find Darth Vader on Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.
For once, the dark side saves the planet. Hopefully Darth Vader will switch off his laser sword too.
The Osocio bloggers choose the best campaign every month. At the end of the year we will have twelve great campaigns from which we will choose the Campaign of the Year.
The Campaign of the Month of February is without any doubt the Zero Rupee Notes campaign from 5thpillar. Almost every blogger voted this campaign as favourite.
See the post here.
“One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success.”
I didn’t watch the Superbowl, but it’s almost impossible to miss the cavalcade of high-end commercials that are produced for the event. And despite the fact that 45% of the viewers are female, most of the ads are aimed squarely at the stereotypical man. The Dodge Charger commercial “Man’s Last Stand” is a perfect example, in which a male voice explains all the “sacrifices” men make, mostly for women, and of course equating that with a need for a new car. While it might take a while for a traditional women’s rights group to create a campaign in response, the great thing about current technology is that an individual can put their response online only days after the commercial airs. “Woman’s Last Stand” is a spot on parody by YouTube user mackenziefegan who provides no details about herself and is not officially associated with any organization, yet she has already garnered almost 200,000 views and thousands of comments! Here’s hoping it creates more debate about the depiction of women in the media…
[Warning there is some Not Safe For Work language]
If you haven’t seen the original you can watch it below…
Don’t like your bank? Change it. Change Your Bank is a grassroots campaign asking consumers to complain to their banks about ridiculous bank bonuses and payscales. In the UK banks such as the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) which have been bailed out by the taxpayer are awarding senior executives enormous bonuses for lacklustre performance. Not only is this unfair, it’s contributing towards a society which is more and more unequal – where people who move money around for a living are rewarded far, far more than nurses, care workers, firefighters etc.
The campaign is still in its early days. So any webdesigners, film-makers, journalists, creatives who want to help – please get in touch!
Posted by Marc | 17-02-2010 23:04 | Category:
Activism
These signs are spotted in the streets of Manhattan, Miami, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia and Williamsburg USA. They are made by TrustoCorp, but who the people are behind this name is unknown. Very clever, some are hardhitting, others are hilarious. At least it will give passers something to think about.
See many more pictures at the TrustoCorp Flickr page.
While it’s not a traditional advertising campaign, I thought the Osocio readers would appreciate this design-centric fundraiser: Font Aid IV: Coming Together is a collaborative typeface to benefit the victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti put together by The Society of Typographic Aficionados. It features ampersands from nearly 400 international designers (myself included). The font is already for sale at Veer & Ascender Fonts, and will also be available at FontShop & MyFonts soon. All proceeds from the sale of the “Coming Together” font will go to Doctors Without Borders, to help with their relief efforts in Haiti. More details and a full list of contributors can be found HERE.
Indian NGO Fifth Pillar have come up with a new weapon in the fight against corruption – a zero rupee note that can be handed to those demanding a bribe. Genius idea. (NB the organisation’s website is temporarily suspended, perhaps because of all the traffic this idea is generating. But you can search to find lots of inspiring stories about the note.)
Déjà vu! This video and poster are protest items of the anti-capitalist, Indigenous, housing rights, labour, migrant justice, environmental, anti-war, community-loving, anti-poverty, civil libertarian, and anti colonial movement fighting at the coming Vancouver Olympics.
I was active at various protest movements in the early eighties and what I see at the Vancouver movement is almost a copy of what was going on 40 years ago. Protesting because the Olympics will take place on unceded Indigenous land I understand. Making the world aware of poverty and migrant justice I fully agree. But saying that the Olympics has acted as a fascist trojan horse since the Hitler games in 1933 is beyond all reality. And from a communications point of view it is very anti-productive. This is Godwin’s Law.
I guess what we are doing here at Osocio, covering the world where marketing and activism collide, is a fascist thing too.
Aman Ki Asha is a new campaign initiated by The Times of India and the Jang Group (Pakistan’s largest newspaper organization) to help create “a stronger Track 2 in the diplomatic and cultural relations between India and Pakistan”. More information about the campaign, which features full-page newspaper ads (shown below) can be found HERE.
Osocio readers know the importance of storytelling in social change strategies. From childhood cancer to human rights accountability, the narrative is one of our most powerful activist tools. At Groundswell we have been thinking a lot about how these stories work, and we’ll soon be publishing a collection of them for cultural activists.
Osocio readers can pre-order the journal here, 20% off, using the code “0soci0” - note the beginning and end zeros, not an uppercase letter O.
Our first edition focuses on crisis folklore and will include offerings from influential authors the world over.
Through the end of the week, Osocio readers can pre-order the journal here, for 20% off! Enter the code below (note the beginning and end zeros, not an uppercase letter O) during your purchase:
0soci0
We are also raising funds from individuals to help us to create a larger, broader and more connected community of actors and participants through a print journal. Donations as small as $1 can be made, and go directly to our printing costs.
Once a year I teach Design Rebels, a course on socially conscious design that I created for Virginia Commonwealth University’s Graphic Design department. As part of the class the students are required to create a real world group project, based on the themes of the class, that reaches into the community beyond the school. This year the class decided to focus on the issue of local, in-season food. They’ve created an art event called Project Winterfood that will give people in the area a fun way to learn more about what grows in the area in the winter and why it’s important to eat locally grown food. This free event is this Wednesday, December 2nd, from 7-10 in Richmond, Virginia. If you’re in the area I hope you’ll consider stopping by.
TckTckTck is an open source activism project of the Global Campaign for Climate Action (GCCA) which is encouraging a “fair, ambitious and binding climate change agreement” at the Copenhagen Climate Summit on December 9th. As part of the campaign a remake of the Midnight Oil song “Beds Are Burning” recorded by over 60 artists and celebrities, and re-written by Midnight Oil themselves has been released. The song is available as a free download HERE.
Overview of 37 innovation principles and inspiring examples for a better world. Made by Marc Heleven from New shoes today, a ídea factory based in Belgium.
New shoes today is a growing number of soulmates in business who give support to people and organisations on their road to creation, innovation and change. Together with clients they take on 21st century challenges. Their values: open - drive - unity - fun - care - today.
The transcript of the slideshare presentation with all links can be found here.
Posted by Marc | 25-10-2009 22:21 | Category:
Activism
10 tactics for turning information into action shows how rights advocates around the world have used the internet and digital technologies to create positive change. The 50 minute film will be launched at the Front Line Club in London, in December 2009 with a series of screenings worldwide. It is accompanied with a deck of cards featuring tools, tips and advice to help you plan your Info-activism action. The 10 Tactics project website will be launched in November.
Kind of déjà vu: hell stations. Remember the last days of Apartheid in South Africa. Shell was banned in Europe by a lot of people because of the wrong choices they made. Removing the “S” from their logo was done often.
Now Amnesty International is doing something similar with the use of Google maps to publicly highlight the damage Shell is doing in the Niger Delta (see Amnesty’s report for further details). You can help by taking photos that obscure the S of the Shell sign from view, and sending them to Amnesty.
SocialDesignZine published a gallery early August entitled Posters for Green Iran. A great collection of social design about the current situation in Iran.
See all 132 posters here.
Oxfam International has been given a bold, typocentric makeover by Barcelona’s Hey Studio which is expected to resonate with a young Spanish audience. Oxfam pursues education, disaster management and health initiatives alongside advocacy and policy research to ensure sustainable development in combating poverty and injustice. The new look highlights issues through confronting icon-typographic mash-ups applied to a vividly coloured range of products from posters to pencils.
Launched to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster is this toxic bottled water from the affacted area which emphasises Dow Chemical’s refusal to take appropriate responsibility for the disaster.
“A new, beautifully-designed line of bottled water - this time not from the melting Alps, nor from faraway, clean-water-deprived Fiji, but rather from the contaminated ground near the site of the 1984 Bhopal catastrophe...”
This is new to me and I love it: Carrotmob. It is a method of activism that leverages consumer power to make the most socially-responsible business practices also the most profitable choices. Businesses compete with one another to see who can do the most good, and then a big mob of consumers buys products in order to reward whichever business made the strongest commitment to improve the world.
With every powerful people’s movement for change, a symbol emerges--an image that can change the world. For the Iranian democracy movement, that image is of Neda, the 26 year old Iranian young woman struck down by a bullet to the heart.
Last week, her devastated family was ordered by the Iranian regime to bury her quietly and without circumstance.
Avaaz.org wants you to send a message of commemoration and solidarity by buying a t-shirt. Proceeds will go to support projects that enable Iranians to freely access the internet.
CEDC, the Center for Educational Design and Communication, helped Avaaz with the design of a t-shirt concept.
Organizations are finally catching on to the idea of using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to really spread the word about their causes.
Above is just one example: Invisible Children - which if you don’t know about already, you should - is using Twitter to spread awareness about their TRI campaign - $3 a week to bring home 3,000 child soldiers. This, coupled with their How It Ends event set to take place in DC at the end of the month, shows how mobilizing the masses around a cause can be a snap with a real-time tool like Twitter.
As part of their campaign this spring to coordinate efforts in over 100 cities in dfferent countries around the globe, the campaign also used tools like Youtube, Mogulus, and Facebook. For details on the “abduction” campaign, see here.
But that’s just one success story. Kevin Jones, founder of a VC firm for social enterprise and the man behind the (awesome!) madness that will be the SoCap09 conference in San Francisco in September, was so kind to chat with me about how socially conscious operations using innovative social media tactics to make real change. Read on for more standout examples.
Hi! We are Judith and Gertjan, a Dutch couple with an open heart and mind for the people of South Asia. In 2010 we will move with our two kids towards South Asia to work as volunteers. Judith is a nurse with a medical management qualification and will be involved in a medical training program. Gertjan is an entrepeneur and will start an education program and an IT business. Our Christian faith is an important motive for us in doing this kind of work.
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Osocio is dedicated to social advertising and non-profit campaigns. It’s the place where marketing and activism collide. Formerly known as the Houtlust Blog, Osocio is the central online hub for advertisers, ad agencies, grassroots, activists, social entrepreneurs, and good Samaritans from around the globe.
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The Shrine Down the Hall
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Hi! We are Judith and Gertjan, a Dutch couple with an open heart and mind for the people of South Asia. In 2010 we will move with our two kids towards South Asia to work as volunteers. Judith is a nurse with a medical management qualification and will be involved in a medical training program. Gertjan is an entrepeneur and will start an education program and an IT business. Our Christian faith is an important motive for us in doing this kind of work.
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