November 2009 Archives
The designer of a charity fundraising appeal explains her choices on Flickr:
This letter was designed to evoke the holiday spirit of giving in animal lovers. Each year the Lake Shore Animal Shelter asks its members and the community to help homeless animals by donating money to their no-kill shelter. The piece needs to stand out amongst all of the charities seeking funds at this time of year. I decided instead of using many pictures of various dogs and cats they care for, to use only one dog on the page allowed me to make him large, and be the focal point of the piece. This has a lot more impact and is very visually appealing.
I'd be interested in seeing more reflections like this. More often than charities realize, words can be the least important part of an effective fundraising appeal.
The Illinois Lottery has received a fair amount of attention in recent years, from its connections to disgraced former governor Rod Blagojevich to the state's controversial plan to sell the lottery to private investors. Now, for the holiday season the Illinois Lottery has launched a new ad campaign using the Christian hymn "Joy to the World" to flog its scratch-off games, a move that has led at least one Christian to complain to the Chicago Sun Times:
In Monday’s paper, columnist Lewis Lazare notes that Energy BBDO has created a series of holiday television commercials using the song “Joy to the World” to sell—of all things—lottery tickets! The new lyrics and retro music may be captivating and clever, but are the people at BBDO familiar with the original words to this Christmas hymn? Or do they care?
“Joy to the world, the Lord is come!”
Or is Linus the only one who still understands what Christmas is all about?
Dan McGuire, Bensenville
It's a paradigmatic case of cultural appropriation, with one community's traditions used to promote ostensibly contradictory values. And as MultiCultClassics observes, the campaign doesn't stop there--"It’s gone from blasphemy to Black clichés."
A powerful use of cartoon imagery in an ad for Brazil's Children's Cancer Support Center.
Still, as this incident from Oregon reminds us, a charity is not immune from intellectual property claims pertaining to the use of copyrighted or trademarked cartoons. Even children's cancer charities have been known to receive cease & desist letters.
Above: an ad for jewelry auctioned in a Feed the Children benefit on Second Life.
The complexity of personal meaning in a bottle.
This photo by Adam Lerner captures one of my own favorite aspects of the city's sublime complexity: the interplay of old-school watertowers with contemporary architecture. Via Curbed.
For the Significant Objects project, writers purchase objects, create stories about them & sell the objects on eBay--thereby demonstrating how objects "acquire not merely subjective but objective value." Above: Bar Mitzvah bookends, with a story by Stacey Levine.
"There lived a kid whose name was Jean Valjean. / He stole some Bisquick Velvet Crumb Cake . . . "
OK, maybe not. But I had a chance recently to check out Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, watching it for the first time since the hours spent as a tyke watching classic silents w/ my great-grandfather on his 8mm projector. I'd forgotten this film's sheer brilliance as a 20th century American take on the Victor Hugo classic.
Microsoft celebrates reaching a sales goal for Windows 7.
Kissing a piece of paper for charity seems to have replaced the traditional kissing booth, which would today be seen less as a fun fundraiser than a hub for spreading the flu.
If the above vintage ad's strategy of prescribing carb-filled crackers to lose weight seems goofily retro (not to mention sexist), check out this new research on carbs as the dietary key to personal happiness.
I saw this pull up on Union Square during my walk today--the Cosmopolitan/Maybelline Kisses for the Troops truck, which used a donation to the USO in a record-setting kiss initiative to get people to line up to try a new line of Maybelline lipsticks. A seamless integration of commercial branding and charity, the effort was at least as clever as a Basket of Kisses.
This would-be viral video for American Diabetes Month joins the ranks of sex-themed do-gooder PR. Meanwhile, the cutting-edge in the commercial realm has moved on to cute animals, a well-worn trope in charity for decades. All ad life's a circle . . .
Personally, I think that showing your organic skivvies to a co-worker is a sure-fire way to score a sexual harassment lawsuit, but this ad from PACT depicts a sexually charged workplace and organic fashion as going hand in hand.
Another example of commercial marketing and social benefit: Soilax, a household cleaner from the 1950s that billed itself as an "important new contribution to family health."
Easy to ridicule as retro kitsch, but quite revealing. The American ideal in 1952: mobile and not working. No longer bound to a piece of land; liberated from having to earn money to survive.
Before then, you're the walking dead.
Earlier today I posted an image from an interesting set of storyboards for a charitable venture. Teasing aside re the bingo, if you've read my work for a while you no doubt guessed that I find storyboarding to be essential for any enterprise--nonprofit or for-profit. Ventures aren't just products and profit; they're interfaces, experiences and, yes, stories. Pictures can be far more effective the spreadsheets in making the whole thing work.
On a related front, today I also have been thinking a lot about this post on the passing of Shel Dorf, founder of the San Diego Comic Con. I've written before about how Comic-Con--a 501(c)(3) organization--blends commerce, charity and community, but as Mark Evanier observes the organization has also had a substantial impact on the revitalization of San Diego itself:
One point I forgot to mention in my piece and which I've included in all the interviews I've given is that it isn't just the comic book community that owes a debt to Shel. It's the city of San Diego, as well. You'd think that the world's largest comic convention would be established in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. Why is it in San Diego? Because Shel Dorf was in San Diego.
And because the con was in San Diego, San Diego changed for the better. San Diego in 1970 was not the kind of town that attracted national conventions. It attracted some tourists because of the zoo and climate. It attracted a lot of sailors on shore leave because of the Naval Stations. But when, for example, the major political parties were considering where to gather to nominate their presidential candidates, San Diego was not even in the running. It didn't have the facilities or the hotels. Now, it has enough of both to lure major conventions and to warrant the building of huge Hiltons and Marriotts. The convention trade has meant a lot of urban renewal to San Diego and the Comic-Con was a major catalyst and inspiration.
So a city was transformed and in many ways reborn...and all because Shel's parents moved there for their retirements and Shel followed.
As you can see from the above picture, today's version of ticker tape includes whole pages of paper flung from office windows. I noticed that pages floating around me during my short drop-by at the Yankees parade in the Financial District looked like pages from a law reference binder, so I checkout out the text:
The law regarding judicial administration of corporate bankruptcy. At the same time, the crowd was shouting "Wall Street sucks!"
The experience of hundreds of people pressed together in a small alley was for the most part Hobbesian, but I gotta admit I laughed when the little kids standing next to me heartily joined in that chant.
Storyboards--a direct descendant of the cartone and modern cartoon--are a staple of films, plays & commercials. Above: design collective Getgo uses the medium to plan a new social venture that apparently involves flying bingo balls.
More at sustainournation.ning.com.