“If you care enough to vote, we care enough to give you a free cup of coffee.” So goes Starbucks' (NASDAQ: SBUX) advertisement depicting the coffee chain's contribution to the presidential election.
“Simply vote, and ask your barista for a tall cup of brewed coffee at no charge (limit one per customer). In the best tradition of democracy, we’re using the honor system so absentee voters shouldn’t have a problem,” said a spokesperson for the Seattle coffee giant. The ad campaign kicked off during the final pre-election edition of Saturday Night Live on NBC this past Saturday.
Free coffee is a good branding move on Starbucks' part: the chain is making sure it is noticed as taking an active part in the nation's most significant event in four years. The ad is well done. It comes across as socially responsible and concerned about what is best for the nation. It also makes Starbucks seem responsive to customer suggestions and concerns: the idea was reportedly suggested numerous times on MyStarbucksIdea.com, the chain's online forum for sharing customer and employee ideas.
McDonald's, the world's best-known fast food chain, is aiming to overhaul its brand image, yanking its current packaging and implementing what Global Chief Marketing Officer Mary Dillon dubs the "biggest packaging initiative in the history of the brand."
The revamped look emphasizes the product over the company's tagline, and features a big picture of the food on the cover. It also features nutritional information and images of fresh produce: potatoes, lettuce, wheat, eggs, and also of farm machinery. The packages come in red, purple, yellow and blue and the lettering uses a wide range of fonts.
Eighty two percent of the chain's food packaging in its nine largest markets is now made from sustainable materials.
The company has been involved in sustainable efforts for some time now: the company's CSR report explains that, currently, over 91% of the fish used in the company's products comes from sustainable fisheries. It has a rainforest commitment policy that bans beef sourced from rainforest areas. Almost all of its slaughterhouses were audited, and approved for animal welfare issues in 2007.
Seven of its markets have introduced an environmental scorecard (a tool for McDonald’s suppliers that links performance indicators to relevant environmental guidelines.)
The company has "green restaurants" – incorporating energy efficient features like permeable pavements in the parking lots to reduce storm water flowing to sewers and roofs that collect rain -- in the U.S. and Sweden. It is in the process of constructing more in Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica and France.
And yet, when one thinks McDonald's, greasy burgers, obesity, and possibly cardiac arrests are still the first thoughts that come to mind for many.
The chain plans to change this using "sophisticated graphics, photography and storytelling" to positively impact customer perceptions.
As of November, McDonald's will extend its packaging overhaul to a whopping 118 countries – from Iceland to India.
Last year, Starbucks went red for the holidays, unveiling an attractive red cup, dotted with white snowflakes and sporting the company's logo in green.
This year, as the season of good cheer approaches, the chain is taking things one step further -- and in a more philanthropic direction.
In a surprise appearance at Starbucks' managers conference in New Orleans, Bono arrived on stage. U2's lead singer announced a partnership between his AIDS organization (RED) and the coffee chain: between November 27th to January 2nd, Starbucks will donate five cents from certain holiday beverages (Peppermint Mocha Twist, Gingersnap Latte and Espresso Truffle) to The Global Fund.
(RED) was co-founded by Bono and Bobby Shriver (the brother-in-law of Arnold Schwarzenegger) to raise funds for The Global Fund, which fights AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
After the holiday season, the chain will designate certain products (RED), and proceeds from these will continue to be delivered to the Fund.
"Here we are, talking about the economy tanking. People are saying, 'Maybe the world doesn't need more coffee houses.' And what do you do? What does Starbucks do? You decide to give your money away," said Bono to his star-struck audience. "This is not charity. This is commerce."
In a press statement, Starbucks discussed the new initiative as framing "our commitment to doing business responsibly, our ability to use our scale as a catalyst of doing good, for our framers, our customers, our planet at large."
"If every single Starbucks customer bought one (RED) Holiday Exclusive (beverage) for a week, we would save 15,000 lives for a year in Africa," said Starbucks Senior Vice President Michelle Gass. The coffee chain has recently been struggling in the face of declining sales, however its stock recovered slightly after Bono's announcement.
Recognized as an unprecedented marriage of design and technological innovation, Stuart Karten's Z!n hearing aid walked away with this year's Cooper-Hewitt People's Design Award.
Available in a palette of six colors that complement hair and skin tones, the Z!n aims to be virtually invisible. On first glance, the 1.3 inch-long finely crafted device coated in high-gloss metallic paint resembles a futuristic fashion accessory. The aim: to make wearing a hearing aid less of a burden for an aging population that Stuart Karten believes is increasingly fashion conscious. “In developing Z!n, we sought to move the perception of the hearing aid from a medical appliance to an object that would help overcome the stigma associated with hearing loss,” says Karten.
Cooper Hewitt, America’s official National Design Museum, offers the award as part of National Design Week (running from Oct 19-25 2008.)
Nominees this year encompassed a wide range of designs ranging from everyday objects like bikes and water bottle to design classics like the Eames Lounge Chair and the Adidas Samba shoe to buildings like the Beijing National Stadium and the Hearst Tower. Top nominees included the Design Observer (nominated for being the best public discussion of design on the Internet), a zip tie ring designed by Natalie Comensoro (nominated for turning something banal and industrial into a timeless piece of art and jewelry, and Bennington bookmarks (glowing overhanging bookmarks left by readers to point others to explore areas of the library they might otherwise overlook.)
New campaign: Time Warner Cable has launched an entertaining new campaign it hopes will go viral. Website, Fame Star, allows you to create your own entertainment: people can upload a picture (or pick from stock images), create some quick dialogue and customize a Hollywood video built around their character. (Via Adweek)
Rebrand: Pepsi plans to rebrand "every aspect of the brand proposition for our key [carbonated-soft-drink] brands: how they look, how they're packaged, how they will be merchandised on the shelves and how they connect with consumers," says PepsiCo Chairman-CEO Indra Nooyi. (Via Adage)
Celebrity endorsement: Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, has recently been spotted around the blogosphere, writing about…. cheap lunch. Turns out, she's actually advertising for a company called ConAgra Foods. (Via New York Times)
Clash of the Coffee Titans – Dunkin' Donuts versus Starbucks: Dunkin Donuts' new ad campaign debuted yesterday, with a TV spot asking people which coffee they prefer Dunkin or Starbucks. The chain has conducted a poll across 10 cities, offering sample packs Dunkin's Original Blend and Starbucks’ House Blend. Dunkin' claims that 54.2% of participants preferred Dunkin’ coffee, while only 39.3% who chose Starbucks. The remaining 6.3% expressed no preference.(Via Brandweek)
Apple's continuing onslaught against Microsoft is getting old. The company's latest anti-Microsoft ads come off as more bullying than funny.
With all the backlash McCain's campaign has been facing with their anti-Obama tactics, one might think Apple would be wary about playing so blatantly dirty. Yet the company continues in its attempts to highlight Vista as an inherently flawed product.
The first, shows John Hodgman (who plays the PC), dividing up stacks of dollar bills into piles for either "advertising" or to "fix Vista." The pile to fix vista is, predictably, laughably small.
The second has Hodgman refusing to use the "V" word – he uses a buzzer to bleep out the word every time Justin Long (who plays the Mac) tries to use it: "we don't use the V word anymore. It doesn't sit well with frustrated PC users. From now, we're going to use a word with a lot less baggage: Windows."
While the new Apple ads aren't all that funny, here's something that IS. Cinematical points to a hilarious video from Canada's Accident Factory on the Mac versus PC showdown. Check it out here:
Available in stores today, Google's new phone, the G1, has already spawned a slew of new applications. Among these is a creation from social music site, imeem, that makes life just a little bit easier for G1 users.
The new application, imeem for Android, brings free streaming music and personalized radio to the phone and enables users to create custom radio stations.
Called "the best application seen so far" (it's still early days) by TechCrunch's Schonfeld, the app comes with a number of continually updating stations influenced by people’s individual listening habits and tastes as well as those of the larger imeem community. It offers a list of the most popular songs and emerging artists across the imeem service, personalized recommendations based on what a user and their friends listen to (on imeem and imeem for Android), and favorite stations that are dynamically created based on artists that people are connected to on imeem.com.
The application integrates with features on imeem.com: people's on the go listening patterns will influence the recommendations they receive on imeem.com, and vice versa. If users discover new artists while listening to imeem for Android, they can “favorite” those artists and automatically become fans on imeem.com, and (again) vice versa.
A user can also find a record of their mobile listening history by logging in to their imeem.com account where all the songs are available for free on-demand streaming. The app does not, however, allow you to access your playlists from the website.
“Our vision is to let our community enjoy imeem anywhere on the Web and beyond,” said Dalton Caldwell, imeem’s founder and chief executive officer. “Today is an important step towards that goal. imeem has created the first cross-platform social music experience with imeem for Android, and we’re looking forward to developing more features and mobile applications for our community.”
The application gives people the ability to purchase DRM-free downloads from Amazon MP3, and is available as a free download through the Android Market.
With the economy tanking and world food prices skyrocketing, concerns about world food supplies, are increasingly taking center stage.
The BBC today published the results of a poll it conducted across 26 countries, asking people for their opinions on rising food prices. Sixty percent stated that higher prices are affecting them a great deal. International and internal conflicts, the energy crisis - and the resulting controversy over biofuel subsidies - have further escalated the situation. According to Oxfam, over 900 million people now face starvation because of soaring prices. That's more stomachs growling than the populations of the US, Canada and the EU combined.
And yet, even before food prices were front-page news, even before regular polls were conducted and celebrities wielded their star power for good, hunger has always been one of the world's most pressing issues.
Today, on World Food Day, international humanitarian aid organization, Mercy Corps pointed to this, cutting the ribbon on a new initiative: The Action Center to End World Hunger. Located in downtown Manhattan in a 4000-foot interactive space, the Center aims to educate and motivate visitors to take action to end global hunger.
Through its new endeavor, MercyCorps has pledged to cut world hunger in half by 2015 by making US aid more effective, making trade fair, helping people around the world adapt to climate change, and encouraging US citizen participation and government accountability with the ultimate goal to respect and uphold people's right to food.
MercyCorps, which works on everything from women's issues to education to natural disaster relief, was selected by the Battery Park City Authority in 2005 to receive a $1.25 million grant to develop the space. The organization has paid the Authority a token $10 for a 30-year lease on the area.
There's a saying: the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. The Action Center primarily uses video as the medium to take impersonal statistics and make them personal. "We don't want to make people leave here feeling hopeless however," cautions Mercy Corps's Communications Officer, Helen Thompson. "We stress solutions – what is being done and what people can do."
Features include a briefing room offering a video of Tina Fey speaking about world hunger, the center, and what people can do; a large, interactive Google Earth map that allows one to zoom in on specific communities to learn about relief and development efforts in those regions; regularly updated video blogs from aid workers and others offering first hand accounts of the food crisis and efforts to end hunger; four wide screen television hubs that focus on how specific issues in particular regions all contribute to world hunger and outlines the solutions currently being implemented; and computers where you can sit down and explore your options to take direct action to mitigate the crisis -- right now.
Full time educators will conduct workshops of up to 2 hours, which aim to educate an audience of primarily middle and high school children about world hunger issues.
The Action Center's website is a key part of its endeavor – it offers almost all the information available at the Center, including how to contribute in tangible ways, depending on how much time you have – a minute, hour, day, week, month, year or a lifetime.
Over the next few days, to mark "hunger action week", the Center has organized a series of events.
Plans for the near future include using the space to hold regular events to highlight MercyCorps's work and the issue at large, featuring and displaying information from an increasing number of other organizations that do similar work in an attempt to accelerate impact, and opening a similar center in Portland, Oregon next year.
Whoever came up with the expression nice guys finish last, was cynical but, for the most part, spot on. Trying to do good in a world like ours can be tough – and if your job involves helping make life better for others while struggling to secure the tools and resources to do so, it's possible that you feel this sentiment particularly acutely.
The overarching problem that plagues most non profits, especially smaller, regional entities, is that of securing funds. Granted, there's a lot more philanthropy of late (a New York Times article from a few months ago mentions new records having been set in the number of individual donations of $100 million or more), but there could always be more. Forbes' release of its yearly billionaire list always shine a renewed light on how much money could yet be channeled towards non-profits.
More than the quantity of funds, is the issue of their distribution; funds tend to be directed at causes and institutions that are large, well known, and by extension, often already well-funded. Paul S. Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation told the Boston Globe that foundation philanthropy in particular, targets established institutions with whom the givers are associated in some way, leaving more disadvantaged organizations with only a "relative sliver" of foundation philanthropy.
So when it comes to securing funds, non-profits have to be smart. One of the most common solutions is finding transparent ways to assure donors that their money is being put to good use. That's where companies like 8-year old Baltimore based Social Solutions come in.
Founded by former social services workers in response to the difficulty of estimating whether their efforts were positively impacting the individuals being served, Social Solutions has created software that measures the correlation between efforts invested and the outcomes they cause.
Currently used by about 5000 organizations, the ETO (efforts to outcomes measurement) software can be customized to suit the needs of the cause at hand, a factor that makes it unique according to CEO Matt Schuber and founder Steve Butz.
"We've created a flexible platform to measure impact across all diff types of programs. There's a difference between a software being created for one very specific purpose, and a software that's being created for configuration by various non-profit organizations. This is one of the things that’s allowed us to move from 2000 to 30,000 users," explains Schuber, a former employee of Microsoft.
Massachusetts based non-profit, Roca, http://www.rocainc.org/ has customized the software to suit its model of youth intervention work. It has been set up to allow workers to measure the efficacy of efforts to make young adults move towards self sufficiency and out of harms way through reduced risk factors.
"We're working with youth who are checked out," explains Anisha Chablani, Roca's Deputy Director.
"We're tracking young people through a change process. Youth workers are usually working with someone who is resistant to engaging with them. Recording past efforts to reach out to young people allows a worker to determine what worked or didn't work last time. The system allows us to keep working at different types and ways of engaging young people."
The Latin American Youth Center, a DC based non profit that aims to equip youngsters with the skills they need to become successful and effective adults, has configured the software to track race and ethnicity in a more detailed form than allowed by the program's default settings.
Apart from the benefits of customization, the software is effective as an organizational tool. "Before, in order to fulfill a simple data request, we had to go in to each and every individual program and pull the exact demographic information needed," explains Isaac Castillo, Director of Learning and Evaluation at the LAYC. With the new software, all data is centrally organized.
And the advantage of using Social Solutions' product over something like Excel? "It's Internet based – our staff can put information in and pull it back out regardless of where they are located," says Castillo. "With size of our organization it would require a very large, sophisticated database to handle our data; rather than spending time creating that we decided to go with Social Solutions."
That being said, the software's primary benefit is intended to be in documenting the translation of efforts into outcomes, a process that proved particularly useful in the LAYC's domestic violence program. The program teaches parents about things like why domestic violence should not be accepted, how women can address it, and why men are wrong in viewing it as an expression of machismo. Using efforts to outcome measurement, the center determined that the way in which the classes were being taught was actually having the opposite effect of that intended: men and women alike were becoming more open to the inevitability of domestic violence. Recognizing this through outcome measurement, the center was able to change the nature of its classes.
The Center also uses ETO software to track what classes and workshops young adults from their independent living program (which caters to individuals who have "aged out" of the foster care system with the intent of living on their own) have taken and correlate these with the subsequent skill levels participants develop in order to investigate the efficacy of these workshops.
"The software has a very front line real world usefulness in documenting the effectiveness of our programming," says Castillo. "We've seen about a 5-6% increase in funding since we started using the software. More than that however, it's making us more efficient as an organization by informing our decisions about what we are offering and helping us identify whether we are providing a program that is working well."
While I found that a cursory examination of the software was not enough to decipher how to use it for ETO measurement, Chablani holds that Roca has found the program user friendly and extremely useful. "It's not just a data dunk. It really validated the work of front-line workers in a way that would help them see the benefits of their work and let us track outcomes," she says. "If this doesn't work then it's just garbage in and garbage out."
The primary benefit of the software according to Social Solutions' Butz and Schuber is the difference it makes to the lives of the individuals being served – increased funding being a byproduct of this. "Its benefit is in providing better services, more effective services. More people are being housed, helped and cared for. And it's happening in a very accountable way."
If you've taken the subway, been to an airport or passed by a few billboards lately, you've probably noticed Dentyne's latest ad campaign, which launched mid-August of this year. It's hard to miss.
Attractive, twenty-something couples canoodling -- on the grass, out of taxis, exchanging minty kisses (and fresh breath). Friends locked in tight embrace or comfortably piled on a small couch, like a close-knit litter of puppies. Captions that incorporate online phraseology: The Original Voicemail (power down, pucker up, make face time), The Original Instant Message (hang up, listen close, make face time), Friend Request Accepted (close browser, open arms, make facetime), Send and Receive (log off, latch on, make face time.)
Make Face Time
The message is simple and strong: make time for the real world; make time to disconnect. Turn off your computers, shut down your cell phones and make the time to meet people in person.
"People are spending more and more time online, and less and less time face to face, together," says Craig Marcus, an executive creative director at McCann Erickson who orchestrated the campaign. "We're not saying technology is bad. It's great, but there are still some things it lacks -- it can't replicate what happens when people are in front of each other. Certain things can't happen online through social networking… All we're saying is be with other people."
In brainstorming, Marcus explains, his team automatically drifted towards using technology as the cultural backdrop against which to create the campaign for Dentyne. "Everyone immediately went to that place. Technology was the obvious thing to push against. But we realized quickly that we were kidding ourselves. We weren't being truthful. Bashing technology would just annoy people more than it would make them feel right."
Truth is something that Marcus brought up several times in his interview with Fast Company – to him a campaign that isn't based squarely on what's genuine, is setting itself up to fail. "We look for what's going on in the world that we can talk about and that's meaningful. It's important to understand that advertising is not a one-way communication anymore. People have more control than ever before. We don't have a captive audience. At the core of everything it's important to respect that and always look for something that's truthful. I can't boil it down to a science. I look at something as a human being and just say yes that works. But I won't stretch the truth of what a brand is."
So We Get the Tech Talk -- But Where Does the Gum Factor In?
McCann Erickson's Dentyne team correctly honed in on technology and new media being all that's hot right now. But what's the connection between gum and technology?
Gum, according to Marcus, makes those close, special moments that technology is cutting into, just a little bit better. "Gum's something you pop in your mouth to make those moments more special. There's nothing worse than talking to someone with coffee breath. Gum makes kissing better, conversation better, it wakes us up a little bit, refreshes our mouths."
We had a cultural insight about how technology sometimes provides barriers to people being together face to face. The moments where you would want a piece of gum aren’t happening as much with technology there," he says.
Dentyne's sales have suffered recently. Mintel, a market research firm, reports that between 2005 and 2007 sales of Dentyne Ice were down 9%, while those of Dentyne Fire were down 26%. " We needed to keep the brand fresh," explains Josette Barenholtz, marketing director for Dentyne. "From a business perspective it was time for Dentyne to evolve itself."
It's true that the brand is interpreting the world or using a trend to suit its own specific needs and Marcus in fact admits, "Sometimes it's about just reorganizing the world around the message you're trying to portray." But they've done it well. While gum is a competitive market and although it's too soon for any measurable results, it looks like Dentyne has been able to achieve relevance, within the larger context of what is perhaps the most pronounced cultural phenomena affecting youth (its target market) today.
The image the campaign is trying to convey: optimism, honestly, free spiritedness and youth, attractiveness (but not beauty). "I'd say it's more about a moment than a look though," qualifies Marcus. "It's about feeling like you're actually in those places with those people."
The brand's core message is a legitimate one, and they've made sure it's in your face. They have television ads, print ads, a "make face time" website, and are planning on a couple of short films they hope will go viral. The print ads are all displayed outdoors in busy locations: "We wanted the work to show up where people are face to face," explains Barenholtz.
Particularly tricky, explains Marcus, was creating a website for Dentyne. Apart from the fact that, as he puts it, "nobody in their right minds wants to go to a website for a gum," offering technology to promote a campaign that revolves around asking people to step away form technology, presented a challenge.
McCann Erickson's solution: to log you off the website down after 3 minutes. Apart from featuring Dentyne's products and its ads, the site also offers quirky, fun services all geared to making people connect in person. There's a "facetime request", which allows you to send a note to someone else requesting to Barenholtz make facetime. There's a map for people's areas that claims to show the best places to make facetime (although when I entered my own zip code nothing shows up.) There's also something called the "Smiley Chamber of Doom" where you can watch emoticons being put to death, were you so inclined.
The campaign, which is running across the US, and in Canada, retains the functional breath freshening element that previous campaigns adopted, but differs in the clear challenge it presents to technology, and the broadening of the relationships addressed to encompass those outside the boy-girl connection.
