Copy: “If you’re not an organ donor when you die, you take someone else with you”
While this blog often features the “best” of what we see happening in social and cause marketing, we often find ourselves featuring other campaigns simply as cautionary tales.
This one, by Lowe in Lowe Cape Town, South Africa, is one of those. While the insight is true, the message is just awful. Organ donation is a wonderful gift, freely given in life as a way to make one’s death help others. It is not an obligation. But this campaign implies that it is.
Why is that such a problem? I find it rather insulting to the people who have chosen to be donors — not through guilt, but for much more noble reasons. And guilt is not considered an effective form of persuasion anymore. It’s rather old hat.
Not the most spectacular psa, but what a sweet lady as the main character. It’s Christabella Zenzile, working at the finance department of Disabled People South Africa. She knows what she is talking about and I’m really touched by her positive approach. And her lovely voice. She takes this video to the highest level.
As Let It Rain Films’ producer Sam Kelly says: “Making this PSA was a very humbling experience for us. We often use the metaphor ‘to walk in someone else’s shoes.’ Well this very brave lady, Christabella Zenzile, cannot walk – she is in a wheelchair – but spending a few days with her made us count our blessings tenfold and get the smallest taste of what living with a disability is all about. There is just so much we don’t know about and so much we all need to bring into our awareness to make South Africa more accessible to all.”
Forget everything you’ve learned about marketing. Just remember one thing: it’s the human factor what counts. Great work!
This is a new campaign from Denmark, initiated by the Region Sjælland.
It is about psychosis, a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a “loss of contact with reality”.
The campaign focus is on early intervention in psychosis. It is a relatively new concept based on the observation that identifying and treating someone in the early stages of a psychosis can significantly improve their longer term outcome.
The message is simple and clear: You can’t flee from what’s inside your head (Du kan ikke flygte fra en psykose).
The early intervention isn’t mentioned in the tv-spot. It think that is smart, it can act as a deterrent. I wonder if that is a strategic decision.
Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation (PMHF) in Toronto has announced plans to raise one billion dollars in five years. This billion dollar challenge will be the largest fundraising campaign in the history of Canadian health care. Part of the launch includes three television PSAs designed to address the skepticism people may have about cancer treatment. The Believe It campaign plays with viewer expectations ...
I’m an lover of Flemish humor in advertising, I’ve said that many times before. And Belgium agency Mortierbrigade used this style again in their latest spot for the Vlaamse Alzheimer Liga (Flemish Alzheimer Liga).
A grandmother’s grandson visits her again and again, with the predictable response. It’s the obvious trick to surprise people with Alzheimer I know from personal experience.
What do you think, is this humor allowed? Or is the disease too intense to make jokes about it?
This may just be the ultimate example of a breast cancer awareness effort using the borrowed interest of sex to get attention.
Yes, “[boobstagram]” is a parody of the popular photography-based social network, Instagram. Except this one, based in France, is all about boobies. Their motto roughly translates as “showing her breasts to the internet is good, showing them to her doctor is better”, and they encourage women to submit creative self-portraits of their cleavage.
There are many:
While harnessing the willingness of young women to expose themselves to an always-interested Internet is hardly a new idea, this campaign wraps itself in the virtuous cause of cancer prevention. But is this really needed? The sexualization of breast cancer is a contentious issue—at best Machiavellian, at worst deeply offensive to survivors and victims.
In their ”why?” page, founder Julien GLT and “sociologist” Lionel Pourtau (both men? hmmmmm...) explain that this is a way to engage young people in an important discussion about breast cancer prevention, using the means of expression at hand.
Take away the cause, and this is no different than any voyeur site. Encouraging young women to commodify their bodies online is not helping anyone except those whose motives are not so lofty.
Want a fun, irreverent campaign to empower young women to be proactive with breast health? Check out Keep-a-breast (”I Love Boobies”), Coppafeel, Feel Your Boobies, Self Chec, or any other cause that does more to raise awareness than say, “Hey, tits!”
As the people who brought us the Sexual Revolution age, STD rates among senior citizens are rising. This video, by the venerable DDB New York, reminds older people in a sex-positive way that they, too, need to play safe.
Grossed out? Not me. I only hope that I’ll be getting as busy in my autumn years.
This new campaign for Peru’s Liga Contra el Cancer reminds men to manually check their testicles for lumps via videogame and hand-held puzzle icons. The message is clear, and the images are certainly attention-getting.
Testicular cancer is known as a young men’s problem, and yet it’s a time in life when few are thinking about disease and mortality. This campaign is extremely lightweight, but may be helpful in starting a conversation about the need to take a “hand-on” approach to preventative personal health.
It’s interesting to note, however, that although genitally-focussed, these ads do not use the naked objectification or sexuality so common in breast cancer awareness ads. Instead of inviting women to pay attention through sexual interest, they make a masturbation joke straight to the men.
“No other community has a goal that bold, and what we know is we have to have equally bold tactics to reach that number,” spokeperson Nicole Angresano told the local media.
Their latest campaign is a guerrilla stunt aimed at girls and parents shopping for fancy clothes to wear to their upcoming high school proms, the social event of a student’s school year. As it’s also an occasion fraught with sexual tension, the United Way decided to remind youth that unplanned pregnancy can turn their worlds upside down.
They placed pregnant mannequins in participating fancy dress stores, with tags on them that read, “A prom date is better without a due date.”
The campaign directs teens (and frightened parents) to Baby Can Wait, a resource site with information on birth control, talking about sexuality, accessing medical services, and sexual assault.
While one could see this campaign as having the unintended consequence of shaming teens who are already pregnant, the United Way insists that they will do whatever it takes to raise awareness and lower teen pregnancy rates. “We have to be aggressive in our approach,” says Ms. Angresano “We have to give it to them straight. We have to be hard-hitting. We can’t put soft pieces out there. We can’t be touchy feely about this.”
In October 2011, the City of Milwaukee announced a 13.6% drop in the teen birth rate to its lowest level in decades. (The data were from 2010: 35.7 births per 1,000 females aged 15-17 years old.)
See a flash video of Fox11’s television coverage of the campaign after the break.
I recently had the privilege of being invited to speak and participate in the 2012 Design Ethos Conference/Do-ference at Savannah College of Art and Design. The creator of the conference, Scott Boylston, is a longtime friend in the relatively small socially conscious design community and I was delighted that…
Some things in life are easy. We know them, we think of them, we understand them. And then there are those phenomena we would rather not know about. All the bad things … murder, rape, child molestation. We try hard to look away, and most of the time we…
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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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