Using Mixed Martial Arts to raise awareness of domestic violence in Brazil

Quite astonishing.  Amazingly brave work; the client (Disque Denúncia) could have lost it's nerve at any point.

Share for Dogs - A fundraising campaign on YouTube

This is a neat idea:  PEDIGREE Adoption Drive, a charity programme from PEDIGREE Petfoods in New Zealand has made a cute film of some puppies.  The video has an ad that runs before it on YouTube, so the more the video goes viral, the more money will be raised.

Has anyone done this before?

Also - earlier work by the same charity:  Find your Doggleganger

Facebook's 'Donate' Button

Facebook has launched a 'Donate' button that charities can put on their pages, so that people can donate without leaving Facebook.  Facebook isn't taking any commission from this.

I think this is great, and ties in well with my 'Frictionless Payments' trend in my new presentation

Full details here

Volkswagen's Bluemotion recycling label

This is a very smart campaign for Volkswagen in South Africa.  To emphasise the environmental credentials of Volkswagen's Bluemotion range, they spent some of the advertising & production budget on pre-paid postage stickers that they put on their magazine ads.



When people had finished reading the magazines they just had to put the sticker on the front then post them back to VW in a standard postbox, letting VW recycle the magazines.  South Africa doesn't have many recycling points, so this effectively put a recycling station in every district.

Very clever, and great contrary thinking.

Lauren Luke promotes Refuge

This is a great use of a celebrity in a campaign.  The domestic abuse charity Refuge have persuaded YouTube make-up tips star Lauren Luke to make a video on how to cover up the signs of domestic abuse.  Full background to the campaign on the Refuge site



Make sure you watch to the end.

Really great video.

Transform Your Patch

Transform Your Patch is a new initiative by Britvic and Pepsi & the charity Groundwork to transform some areas of the UK.  It's going to work a bit like Pepsi's Refresh Everything in the US - people vote for their local areas.  The aim is to transform local public spaces like parks, playgrounds, 5-a-side pitches and skate parks.



Anyone buying one of the featured drinks is contributing towards the regeneration fund; funds are awarded based on the number of votes each project gets.

The UK's been split into different regions, to give everyone a local site to vote for.

It's a potentially great bit of CSR by Britvic.  Get involved here

The Next Bigger Better Society Conference

My ex-colleague Matt Bamford-Bowes has created a new conference, Get Together, as part of an initiative called The Next Bigger Better Society.
It sounds very interesting and inspiring, and he agreed to answer some questions about the motivation for the conference, and his new project.
The conference takes place in mid-November, and if you go I’ll see you there.

Ben Hammersley - one of the confirmed speakers

Dan - What was the initial inspiration for project?
Matt - Easyjet. It might be a bit odd to think that Easyjet inspired a project about creating a collaborative conference, but here is why. I went to a conference with one of the partners at The Brooklyn Brothers. It was a pretty dire experience, poor speakers pitching about their "amazing" technology,  and what really captured the essence of this was the guy sat in the row in front of us spending an hour booking flights on Easyjet. It made me believe there was a better way of doing conferences, one that involved the audience as well as the speaker.

D - Why a new conference?  When does a conference work and when do books / blogs / whatever work?
M - Why a new conference is a question I have asked myself and am constantly asked. There were two reasons for it. The first was that I believed there was a gap in the market, a gap which could be filled by a conference that was more collaborative in nature than your typical conference. I have this genuine belief that this conference will been seen as intellectually important on the global stage, not just here in the UK. The second was value. I, like many people around me, would love to experience TED but the £4000 cost of a ticket is incredibly out of reach. It is a conference for the elite, the top 1%. I wanted the Get Together Conference to be about stimulating debate and curiosity about meaningful topic and themes, but at a price most people could afford. I guess you could say we are trying to be about the 99%. At £97 for our tickets, I think we are managing to achieve that.

D - What's the best conference you've been to, and what worked in particular?
M - Conferences fail for me when speakers are allowed to use it as a veiled pitch about their company. Why this doesn't work for me is that people go to hear from the speaker not from the brand. I don't want to hear about Coca-Cola for example, but i'd love to know how their CEO runs the business efficiently and effectively. I'd go to see him speak otherwise it just becomes another advert. By pioneering the idea of getting two speakers on stage at the same time talking about a challenge or an idea we have set them, I think this gives much more interesting conversation and hopefully post talk debate.

D - Any planned offshoots / follow ups?
M - We are already thinking about how we follow up next year with two events. One will be in support of our Get Together Fund, which is aimed at getting teens and their ideas off the ground through mentoring, microfunding and any other means. All the profits from this event will be put back into the fund and it will be driven by sponsorship. The idea of the event will be influential, modern idea curators talking to teens from around the UK, aiming to inspire them about themselves and their futures. The second will be a follow-up to Get Together and we are already in discussions with some really interesting speakers from around the world. We are also in discussions about a conference in Madrid, but we want to get the UK right first.

D - What is missing in conference landscape?
M - Dialogue. Genuinely I don't feel that there is much dialogue between speakers and audience at any conferences. I want our speakers to be able to interact with the audience and the audience to feel absolutely connected to what the speakers are talking about. If we fail in both those levels then no matter how many tickets we sell I don't think we will have been successful.


Get Together takes place on Friday 18th November from 9am – 1pm at The Wellcome Auditorium, NW1.
You can get tickets here.
You can find out more about the Get Together fund here, and The Next Bigger Better Society here.

Consuming Less; Consuming Better

Lots of brands are stressing their environmental credentials.  Some recent examples -

Howies Hand Me Down - a range of clothes and bags designed to have a life longer than the wearer.

The IOU Project - items made from cloth made by weavers in India.  Expensive products that are pretty much unique

A.P.C ask people to bring back their old pairs of A.P.C. jeans, and buy new pairs at cost price

Patagonia's Common Threads Initiative with Ebay - take the pledge to buy less, and buy used Patagonia items

Rapha's Jersey Downsize offer - if you lose weight as a result of your cycling, you can return your old Rapha top and buy a new one for half price

As a related point, I'm starting to think that just as the well off are now generally thinner than the less well off - a factor of changes in food production in the latter part of the 20th century - the more well off are starting to have less 'stuff' than the less well off.  I think I've noticed this more since reading John Naish's book 'Enough'.

The more well off can afford better quality, so they need fewer items of clothing, they are more likely to have more digital technology so they can live more with downloads rather than physical objects.

What this means for marketers is a focus on quality, difference and scarcity.  If you only want two pairs of shoes (rather than 20) you're going to make sure that those two pairs are pretty special.

My picture from Jack Draws Anything

I'm delighted to say that Jack Henderson has now drawn the picture commissioned by me, and put it up on his Jack Draws Anything site.

I asked for a picture of Spiderman playing football with an elephant, and I think Jack has done a very good job!

Jack has now raised over £25,000 for the Sick Kids Hospital - and you can still sponsor him here.

Also, he's up for a .Net award, for Social Campaign of the Year.  Click here to visit the .Net page and vote for him.

Nike MAG

In Back The The Future Part II (the one in the future, not the Wild West one) Michael J Fox wore some Nike sneakers that have been called 'the greatest sneakers never made'.



Now they have been.  Nike has produced 1,500 of them, to be sold on Ebay, in aid of the Michael J Fox Foundation, which is raising money to find a cure for Parkinson's Disease.

You can see more about the shoes here, and bid on them here. They're currently selling for about $4,500 a pair.

What mythical goods would you bring to life?

Quitting Smoking with Mobile & Social (Concept)

This is a great concept from a group of students at the Miami Ad School.  It integrates a mobile app with Facebook so that your friends can pile on the peer pressure.



(It seems that great minds think alike - here's a similar concept from the Cannes Future Lions)

I'd love to know whether it is actually possible to integrate in this sort of way, and get it approved by the app stores.  I suspect not, but it's great that students come up with impractical (but brilliant) ideas.  Maybe when they graduate they can make it happen!

Via Adverblog

Willie Nelson sings Coldplay for Chipotle

This excellent video, made by Johnny Kelly, was produced by Chipotle to promote the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation which focusses on sustainable food, and not exploiting farmers.



Via Adweek

PepsiCo 10 - a Case Study

PepsiCo 10 is a business incubator project from Pepsi.  Originally launched last year in the US, it aims to find innovative start-ups to fund and mentor.  It positions Pepsi as an innovative company, and also (I assume) gives then first dibs on the technologies that they are supporting.

It's now coming to Europe - here is the announcement:



But how does it work?  Here's a case study.

BreakoutBand is a social media music game.  Create a track using the tools on the site, then release it, and watch it climb in the charts.


Splash Video from BreakoutBand on Vimeo.

Pepsi Max used BreakoutBand to create a contest at SXSW 2011, as both an online and live experience.

As it says in the case study "BreakoutBand participants engaged with the branded music experience for 
an average of 29 minutes and 60 percent shared their beats on Facebook"

This song was the winner.  Nice 'pouring' sounds at the end!

(Here's another competition that BreakoutBand have run with Old Navy)

Good luck to any companies from Europe.  I think it's great that PepsiCo are doing this, and I look forward to more innovative uses.

Find your Doggelganger

Doggelganger is a site created by Pedigree Petfoods to promote canine adoption in New Zealand.

Simply upload your photo, and it matches you with the perfect dog from their registry.

If I lived in New Zealand I'd be straight down there to collect Grace - she looks adorable.  (If I lived in New Zealand I'd presumably have the space for a dog!)

(The site seems to indicate that it's been around since 2009.  No idea how this has suddenly become popular again.  I heard about it from Metafilter)

Giving your spare space away

I like this very clever banner ad for the Nissan Micra.

To emphasise how good the car is with space (lots of places to stow stuff), the car ad only took up a small part of the banner, leaving the rest for people to fill with their own text car ad.



The banner then tweeted the user's car ad.

Also in the same vein, is this excellent work by Ben & Jerry.



They got people to opt in to donate spare characters from their tweets to help promote Fair Trade through Fair Tweets

This is my tweet 'Chewing on a yummy banana'.

Both are really good examples, because in the first the brand gives something to users, and in the second users are encouraged to give something to charity.

Jack Draws Anything

Jack Draws Anything is a very enterprising project by 6 year old Jack Henderson.

Jack's brother Noah has had to spend time in the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh, and while he was there the hospital looked after Noah, but also Jack and his other brother Toby.  Jack is now trying to raise money (originally £100, now 10,000) by drawing pictures on request.



Ask for a picture here, but first donate money here.

Visit Jack's site here, to see some of the pictures he's drawn already.  For example here are two different pictures that feature Doctor Who.  I'm not allowed to feature any of the pics here (I hope my use of the logo above is ok), as Jack says on his site:

"All pictures belong to me Jack and are copyright © Jack Henderson 2004–2011.
Don’t steal my pictures or else I’ll become a lawyer when I grow up."

Brilliant work.  & no Jack, we'd hate you to have to be a lawyer when you grow up because you're clearly a very talented and enthusiastic artist!

Here's the link to donate again.

Via Metafilter

Update - 25th November - they won the .net Magazine award for Best Social Campaign of the Year!

Pixels for Japan

The agency Momentum have created this project to raise money for Japan - Rebuild Japan Pixel by Pixel

Visit the site to buy a pixel; there's a very simple integration with Facebook and Justgiving makes it all very straightforward.  A pixel costs only £2.

I've given (& you should too!)

Leatha Face

A campaign by Cancer Research UK to warn against the dangers of sunbeds!

Also on Facebook

Let's see how this goes down with the target audience.

Bid for celebs to follow you for Comic Relief

To raise money for this year's Comic Relief several British celebrities are offering to follow you on twitter, re-tweet you, and mention you, plus some special items.

"The ‘Super-Follow’ means that the celebirty will do ALL of these things...
1.    Follow you on Twitter for 90 days
2.    Retweet one of your tweets 
3.    Send out a tweet including your Twitter @username"

Bidding is through Ebay.  So far Emma Freud has the highest bid at over £1,500, but her offer also includes a walk on part in her partner Richard Curtis' new film.  (Richard Curtis is also available, and will join twitter especially, and follow just you...)


As part of their deals Miranda Hart is also offering a signed script, Nick Frost is offering both a poster of his film Paul, signed by the cast, and a 5 minute phone call, and Christian O'Connell is offering to have you as a guest on his breakfast show.

It's easy to be cynical about Comic Relief, but I really like this.  It's fun, and it's far more involving & engaging for fans than last year's fund raiser where fans had to give money to get celebs to end their twitter silence (which was a bit of a flop, according to Popbitch).

Build it!

One of the things that brands are encouraged to do these days is to build useful tools - brand utility and that sort of thing.  Don't just send messages to people, give them something that they can use to make their lives easier or more interesting.  Nike Plus, Nike's collaboration with Apple is always held up ad a great example.

A perfect non-brand example is Churnalism.com.  Churnalism.com is a site that lets you input the text of a press release, and it then finds where this has appeared in the British press (& BBC websites), and the extent to which the journalist just cut and paste from the press release.

(The phrase churnalism was coined by Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News, to describe things that appeared in newspapers but were just regurgitated press releases)

Two great examples from the site:

A pretty spurious research study by a polling company, over 90% repeated word for word in the Daily Mail.  (See them side by side here)

A press release from the NHS, churned to a greater or lesser extent by 14 different news organisations.

Churnalism was created by the British charity the Media Standards Trust, and really brings their work and aims to life.

Far better to promote themselves and explain their values by building something like this, than produce an advertising campaign.