The Story of Cosmetics

by Mario Vellandi on July 28, 2010

[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 8.5min]

An interesting new video to say the least. However, while the production is great and humorous, there are some important points to be made.

This is a campaign video, meant to dramatically simplify a complex subject, make it easy to understand, and influence people toward some type of action or line of thinking. That said, it is biased, and doesn’t meet the needs of fair and balanced reporting as would a journalistic segment. It goes beyond the max 10-30 seconds that television campaigns would run, and probably costs less to produce and distribute.

What Annie and the animators do well is employ both humor and scare tactics through colloquial narration and imagery. It is amusing! And it can also be quite influential.

As with every such campaign with a protagonist, there is a corresponding set of antagonists. This gentleman went to the work of dissecting Annie’s video with a detailed critique highlighting the campaign’s bias and simplification of facts. Briefly watch the rebuttal video here. Unfortunately, although this detractor expounding on the importance of objectivity, he gets personal and overly critical, thus missing the point of an effective rebuttal :)

What does all this say for communications? While producing media for marketing purposes is becoming increasingly common, there is a responsibility toward being objective and providing facts. While some people may be easily swayed through vivid imagery, reminders of personal values, and scare tactics, there are others who will watch closely and will proudly cry foul. Maybe there’s a strong counterargument in the works then. The good thing is that this all fosters further dialogue. However, certain subjects like this that are complex like climate change, people will only have so much mental space or time for. For this reason, objectivity is really damn important. Make any potential “holes” tight and open to interpretation.

Whether a campaign or promotional media piece is for ethically good or bad causes, left or right, good communicators will step outside themselves and create media that is credible and doesn’t overly rely on emotional appeal. Think in terms of the enemy or antagonists. Sometimes using manufactured doubt can be extremely helpful, akin to using an enemy’s weight to your advantage like in Judo. Just be ethical about it, and don’t lose sight of the message to drill home.

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Meaningful Social Media for Values Driven Organizations

by Mario Vellandi on July 21, 2010

Just finished up a new graphic to shed some light on a perpetual 4 step process of meaningful marketing:

Meaningful Social Media for Values Driven Organizations

A macro perspective map of four activity sets that should be run concurrently for meaningful social media to gain traction and move forward, for both single and multiple projects. Given that the upperleft quadrant first highlights content production, one can assume this is a content production and interaction model (for which it would be great), but you can perceive it any way you want :)

Sometimes it’s only necessary to participate in one activity set, based on a project’s short scope. However, most of these four activities need to be undertaken at some point.

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CSR 2.0 – The Future of Corporate Social Responsibility

July 14, 2010

Wayne Visser is a longtime consultant in CSR and had made a pretty good, and short 13 slide presentation on how the practice needs to change. He advocates abandoning the old limited scope of CSR, and adopting the modern, holistic, and proactive Corporate Sustainability & Responsibility. Sounds good to me. Since my career wasn’t in […]

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CSR in Practice – Bailey Partnership

July 13, 2010

I recently stumbled upon this video produced by BusinessLink.gov.uk as a story about the CSR efforts of an English architecture firm, primarily as it relates to the benefits of having established volunteerism and employee happiness programs (among other areas). So while this wasn’t produced by Bailey Partnership, it serves as an amazing 5min introduction to […]

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Meaningful Marketing through Relevance and Value, with Bob Gilbreath

July 12, 2010

From one of my new favorite marketers, Bob Gilbreath talks about the current state of marketing, having transitioned from advertising to permission marketing, to what is espoused by some (gleefully including ME!) to be a higher order level. One that fulls human needs and desires beyond function & emotion. Without wanting to dive in the […]

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Values Authenticity & Alignment in Sustainable Brand Development

July 11, 2010

From an interview I did a little over a year ago with Mona Amodeo, President and Founder of idgroup Consulting and Creative
You place a high value on branding in corporate sustainability efforts. I believe I know why. We’d like to help people understand why these programs aren’t just altruistic or even […]

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Business Values Branding – Meta Model

July 9, 2010

A few months ago, I was sitting in a BJ’s restaurant with my big spiral notebook, a good Hefeweizen, and a swarm of thoughts on branding for good. In the last 3 years, I’d realized through observation, experience, and enough books and articles on the subject, that branding really is what people experience in their […]

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Design Leadership: Requisite Attitude, Skills, and Traits

July 8, 2010

Fun presentation and collection of thoughts from Frog Design’s David Sherwin and Justin Maguire on the required attitude and traits for innovative leaders. I agree with much of it. I’ll stress a desire to see the big picture from a balanced perspective, the willingness to step forward and say “We can do better!”, the desire […]

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Rising Global Consciousness Through Data Capturing

July 7, 2010

[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 5.5min]
As quoted from the description in the link above:
“Over the past century but accelerating over the past couple of decades, we have seen the emergence of a kind of global data field. The planet itself - natural systems, human systems, physical objects - have always […]

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3 Trends in Information Architecture & Interaction Design, by Erin Malone

July 6, 2010

Neat presentation from Erin Malone on what she sees as three trends in information architecture. Blend that term with interaction design, user experience, social behavior, and psychology to get the bigger picture (since IA is somewhat of a boring subject in itself). See her article for the thoughts behind the slides.

[Slideshow Link for Email/Other Subscribers]

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The Sustainability Consortium – Opportunities

July 2, 2010

From the Sustainability Consortium comes this animation about their organizational mission in bringing together brands and academics to collectively pursue better product manufacturing through a shared life-cycle assessment and materials database. Creatively speaking, I thought the content style in the beginning was a little trite, though it got better as the story unraveled and must […]

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The Story of Charity Water

July 1, 2010

Great (older) video from Charity Water’s Scott Harrison that uses the power of founder-narrated storytelling to describe the history and mission of an organization. To me, it’s a style of marketing I call Cause Championing combined with brand identity. For nonprofit organizations, this is likely to be one and the same (though I’ll save that […]

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Chief Meaning Officer: Tangible Ways to Create Intangible Value

June 30, 2010

So one of my favorite marketers, Tim Leberecht, put together a slidedeck on 7 rules for the Chief Meaning Officer. Now if you’ve been following me along for a while, you’ve seen how much of a social media, branding, innovation, and sustainability/ethics aficionado I am. Thus in going through Tim’s slides, there will be many […]

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Interview Avec Moi – Digital PR & Sustainability/CSR

June 29, 2010

[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 3.5min]
Yes sir, that’s me in the interviewee seat with Kevin Long of JustMeans at Sustainable Brands 10. Kevin had caught me at a tired moment, but there was no way I was going to let him out energize me, out passion”ate” me, or give him the upper hand (wink).
In […]

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POET Cellulosic Ethanol – Aspirational Marketing

June 27, 2010

If you didn’t know, POET is the leading biofuel production company in the US. So to see their ads recently in prime time television on CNN, was refreshing not only for the opportunity of greater public awareness of homegrown alternative energy opportunities, but also for the creative direction they took. The small but proud voice […]

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