The Super Bowl is known for two things… football and commercials. I’m not too keen on football, but the commercials have become just as hyped up as the game itself and the halftime show, so I decided to critique Super Bowl 2015’s commercials instead. 

While this year’s Super Bowl was rife with titillating side stories (deflated balls, Katy Perry’s half time show, etc.), I tried to critique the Super Bowl based on how bad this year’s commercials were. Spoiler alert: I hated most of them.

Fail #1: Chevy Truck ad

The Chevy Colorado, or whatever-the-heck-new truck this company is slinging, decided it would be totes fun to objectify men. (I hate it when anyone mocks any gender.) Anyhow… the women all fawn over the man who has the big truck… because he’s a “bad boy” – a rebel. All the women dislike the man with the small, sensible car (double meaning, much?) because he’s the one you bring home to mom. #barf

Fail #2: The Coke Hack

#MakeItHappy? More like #MakeItCrappy … right, people?

Really, though. The Coke ad that aired was hilarious… hilariously off-point for what the company is really all about. If some Coke really spilled atop the Interwebs, it would cause everyone watching to get type two diabetes… not feel more love.

Fail #3: The GoDaddy ad

You aren’t fooling us, GoDaddy. We still remember your BS puppy ad. You do sell to small businesses, but you could do so without promoting irresponsible dog breeders in your oh-so ironic way, and exploiting women. #gohome

Fail #3: The McFail

How about McDonald‘s asks people to “pay it forward” by slapping the food out of peoples’ mouths? How about these people call their relatives and say, “I love you so much, I won’t subject you to this death food.”

—

As you can see, I got angry way more than I got happy with these ads.

What ads did you like? Am I just a total hater?

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Image: Philip Robertson

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These findings sparked the idea for a new campaign from beauty company Trilogy: 100% Unretouched.

It means just what it sounds like. The natural beauty company took a bold step (can you imagine another large, mainstream company doing the same?) by making a promise to only feature unretouched images of women in its advertising. Naturally (pun intended!) Trilogy have sparked a national conversation around the issue in Australia and now, the world. 

In the official campaign media release, Corinne Morley, global sales and marketing manager for Trilogy, said the company has “already received positive feedback from thousands of women through letters, emails and social media on retouching and it’s clear that our community not only wants to see realistic representations of beauty in advertising and the media, but are embracing their own natural beauty as well.”

It’s not a surprise; an average woman is subject to multiple images every day of perfectly Photoshopped women (who are usually great-looking models to begin with). As retouching technology has become more ubiquitous, we are seeing that faux perfection in places we never did before—from local low-budget ads to our friends’ wedding shots. And magazine covers and editorials are more and more heavily ‘shopped every year. And now we can all get in on the action: Even popular app Instagram allows you to apply different filters to your shots (though sometimes these can just be great to brighten a too-dark pic or make it look moody and fun). But plenty of Instagram selfies are more about how great the filters make your skin look, which is why one element of Trilogy’s campaign is to encourage women to use the hashtag #FilterFreeFriday when uploading images of themselves.

Trilogy’s asking for comments on the campaign app and for the public to share unretouched photos of themselves on the page and through other forms of social media.

The three ambassadors of the campaign are Zoe Foster Blake, a well known Australian beauty expert, writer and blogger, Trilogy’s Business Manager, Jenny and model Amanda, who has worked with the brand previously and whose natural beauty helped to inspire the campaign.

In fact, Amanda was the face of another Trilogy campaign called Every Face Has A Story To Tell which was a sort-of precursor to the current conversation. The images of Amanda were left unretouched for Every Face and the brand included a small note in the corner of the ads, letting their customers know they didn’t retouch the images because they were committed to celebrating real, natural beauty. The response was so overwhelming, that the 100% Unretouched campaign became a continuation of an already-great idea.

As a brand, Trilogy has always had a reputation for keeping things honest, innovative and natural. Founded in 2002 by Kiwi sisters Sarah Gibbs and Catherine de Groot, it has maintained its commitment to ethical and natural skincare. Rosehip Oil is the core of its product formulations and the label has even pioneered a method of extracting the purest, most potent oil from rosehip seeds for high performing, natural products.

It’s exciting to see beauty brands apply honesty, innovation and ethics to responsible marketing and advertising. Not to mention celebrating what it is that makes women naturally beautiful—their whole, real selves.

Images: Trilogy

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Just for the taste of it?

Today Diet Coke celebrates its 30th birthday. Since that fateful day when it  was introduced on August 9, 1982, ad campaigns have been targeting sexy, savvy women that just want to keep their waistlines small. In our mid-80s and early 90s stupor (most likely shoulder-pad induced), we were seduced by the likes of Paula Abdul and Whitney Houston selling us a chic and slim product that was made to make us look and feel good. Or at least so the advertising led us to believe.

Lest you think that our newfound love of farmers markets, quinoa salads and artisan cheese would have us move away from mass marketed, artificially sweetened and carbonated drinks, thanks to advertising, branding and marketing, Diet Coke has seated itself as the second most popular soda in the world, with 927 million cases sold in 2010. In Europe you can buy lingerie-inspired Diet Coke bottles designed by Jean Paul Gaultier himself, and apparently it’s so delicious that one consumer in England was drinking seven pints a day for 10 years.

Diet Coke makes you feel sexy. An empowered woman. And hey men, if you drink it, the ladies will be drooling all over you!

We have been seduced by advertising, forgetting to ask ourselves what downing a diet soda a day really does to our bodies.

Diet Coke’s addicts will probably tell you that the research on aspartame is inconclusive (despite the fact that it has over 90 known side effects). As Zoe Williams put it in an article on the history of Diet Coke in the Guardian:

Artificial sweeteners are a very controversial subject. Some governmental health authorities may say they are safe enough, but in the nutrition industry, that’s still up for debate. Some studies indicate that the man-made molecular structure of some artificial sweeteners could be linked to certain health problems. This requires much more research. Research however, has indicated other adverse issues from consumption of artificial sweeteners, including encouraging sugar cravings; and increasing appetite.

No matter how many cheesy ads we watch, deep down we know we shouldn’t be drinking the stuff. Just like you know fully well that you shouldn’t down an entire chocolate cake, or eat barbecued ribs for every meal. “All good things in moderation!” some might say, but is Diet Coke a good thing? Sure, we have yet to prove causation between drink consumption and obesity, but do you see scientists having to come to conclusions on the health effects of water? The fact that we have to test soda to begin with should be true cause for concern.

We should know better. We can forgive our predecessors for sucking down Tab and later turning to Diet Coke when it rebranded, but the fact that we’re still guzzling sodas of any kind in 2012 is simply unacceptable. Single use plastic bottles (because it doesn’t always come in cans), artificial sweeteners, global greenwashing… pick your poison; the entire soda industry is one that’s made up of not only promoting a product whose nutritional elements we don’t need – trust me, Diet Coke is not the place to get your daily dose of, well, anything – but also using resources that could be put to better use elsewhere.

Want to really celebrate Diet Coke’s 30th birthday? Try drinking a nice, sexy glass of water instead.

Image: Amy McTigue, Tim’s Blog

The post Happy 30th Birthday Diet Coke! Keeping Smart Women Drinking Crap for Three Decades appeared first on EcoSalon.

Stroke and heart-attack inducing portions of unhealthy fats, serious hygiene issues and animal cruelty should be enough to keep you away from these 10 fast food chains.

Given that the nature of fast food requires it to be quite literally thrown together by low-paid employees using low-quality ingredients, it’s hard to find reasons to ever get food there in the first place. But let’s say you sometimes get a hankering for a certain type of fried chicken sandwich and some piping hot fries, and you just can’t resist hitting up the drive-through on the way home from work or in the midst of a long car trip. You might appreciate knowing, first, that certain chains will turn around and use your money to fight against gay marriage, while others base their branding on sexist stereotypes. And let’s be real: most of them are just plain gross. Here are 10 of the absolute worst.

Chik-fil-A: Anti-Gay, Anti-Kale, Egregious Misspeller

If Chik-fil-A was aiming to offend as many people as possible and make themselves out to be a comic book-worthy villain, they’ve succeeded, between anti-gay sentiments and trying to destroy a guy who just really loves kale. Chik-fil-A has long funded anti-gay groups and propositions including “ex-gay therapy.” Then, in 2011, it sued a Vermont-based folk artist for selling t-shirts and bumper stickers that say “Eat More Kale,” alleging that the phrase might  get mixed up with their own advertising tagline, “Eat Mor Chik’n.” Because it’s so easy to confuse family-farmed kale with factory-farmed fried chicken.

If you do get a hankering for a fried chicken sandwich, Chik-fil-A style, you don’t have to resort to slinking guiltily through one of their fast-food drive-thrus (closed on Sundays, because they’re extra-godly.) Make yourself a “Chik-fil-Gay sandwich with the help of YouTube chef Hilah Johnson. It’s bound to be better than the real thing.

McDonald’s: Global Disseminator of High-Fat, Low-Nutrition Junk

It’s hard to even call the slop that McDonald’s serves by the billions around the world food when a burger they made in 1996 still looks exactly the same 16 years later. McDonald’s meals are loaded with fat, calories and sodium, with so little nutrition that your pets’ food might actually be a healthier choice. The fast-food kingpin processes almost a million cows per year into hamburgers, making it a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and supports the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. And have you ever wondered what’s in that secret sauce, anyway? 33 ingredients, including something called propylene glycol aginate.

Burger King: Dirtiest of All Fast Food Chains

Mmm – boot-flavored lettuce. We can’t lie to ourselves – the sort of thing that was documented in a photograph at an Ohio Burger King happens everywhere, including behind the closed doors of fine-dining restaurant kitchens. But recent headline-grabbing incidents aside, Burger King has repeatedly been deemed the dirtiest fast food chain of them all. A Dateline NBC investigation identified 241 critical health violations at 100 locations including employees not washing their hands, uncovered food in the fridge and grime and debris in the ice shoot. Furthermore, activists revealed in 2008 that Burger King has engaged in some tricky tactics to discredit efforts to improve horrific conditions suffered by migrant workers in Florida tomato fields.

Taco Bell: Low Quality Food, Racist Ads

This slinger of faux Mexican food actually came in last in the aforementioned Dateline NBC investigation with the least health violations out of 10 fast food chains, but that doesn’t mean it’s clean. Among the 91 violations discovered at 100 locations were dirty counters and rodent droppings. In November and December 2006, over 70 people in five states were sickened by bacteria-infested onions at Taco Bell restaurants. The chain is pushing a “fresh, healthy” angle with its new Cantina line, which attempts to mimic the higher quality food at the higher-end Chipotle chain. But while Chipotle uses hormone-free meats and organic produce when possible, Taco Bell skimps, and customers can tell: it consistently gets low quality food scores in customer surveys. Granted, the Cantina line hasn’t debuted just yet, but the same employees who toss around sloppy refried bean and nacho cheez Gorditas are going to be putting together those higher-end meals.

One thing Taco Bell has proven itself proficient at, other than convincing people that they want to eat tacos made out of Doritos: packing as many racial stereotypes into its advertising as possible.

KFC: Culinary Abominations Galore

Two words: Double Down. This disgusting monstrosity of a sandwich is now the very definition of fast food gluttony – a bacon and cheese sandwich encased in two hunks of fried chicken in lieu of bread. Its announcement on April Fool’s Day made it seem like a joke, but the sandwich was launched in the U.S. less than two weeks later. KFC is also responsible for the gastronomic abomination that is the Cheesy Bacon Bowl. In April, KFC had to pay out $8.3 million to the family of a little girl who was brain-damaged after contracting salmonella at one of its Australian branches. And of course, KFC has been the focus of a long-running PETA campaign called “Kentucky Fried Cruelty,” and for good reason: employees at a KFC supplier were filmed kicking chickens and throwing them against a wall.

Arby’s: High Calories, Not so Clean

Does one human finger in a sandwich – proven not to be a planted hoax by a money-hungry customer with a lawsuit gleaming in his eye – reflect on an entire restaurant chain? It does when that chain has hundreds of critical health and sanitation violations under its belt. So not only do Arby’s employees fail to wash their hands, they also fail to retrieve pieces of said hands when they’re accidentally removed by the meat slicer. More than 70 people were sickened with salmonella after eating at a Georgia Arby’s in 2007.

Arby’s is home to some of the most calorific fast food items in the nation, including the 740-calorie Beef N’ Cheddar with Pepper Bacon sandwich, which has both cheese sauce and something called “red ranch sauce.”

Carl’s Jr./Hardee’s: Monster Calorie Burgers, Sexist Ads

Carl’s Jr. has distinguished itself by trying to make grease and messy, dripping chemical-laden sauces sexy with ad campaigns featuring women like Paris Hilton and Sports Illustrated cover model Kate Upton, wherein the women are seen as something to be devoured, too. Sister restaurant Hardee’s has had its own sexist ads, like one that says “Guys don’t bake.” Both brands rely on marketing themselves as “manly,”associating masculinity with massive stacks of low-quality meat.

While Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s are the first fast food chains in the nation to offer turkey burgers, that’s hardly enough to make up for three of the unhealthiest fast food sandwiches in America: the Hardee’s Monster Thickburger (1420 calories), the Hardee’s Double Bacon Cheese Thickburger (1300 calories) and the Carl’s Jr. Double Six Dollar Burger (1520 calories.)

Wendy’s: Not as Healthy As You Think

With the help of a cute pigtailed mascot and a reputation that still hinges on a perception of old-fashioned quality after all these decades, Wendy’s is often considered to be one of the healthier fast food options. The truth is, Wendy’s is hardly healthier than its most-maligned competitor, McDonald’s, and it’s not even as clean. You might imagine that Wendy’s natural-cut sea salt fries sound like a refreshingly less-processed alternative to other fast food fries, but they actually have way more sodium at 630 milligrams in a large-sized serving. That’ll blow a huge hole in your recommended maximum daily intake of 2400 milligrams. The Triple Burger with Everything and Cheese is a more obviously unhealthy choice with 970 calories and 60 grams of fat, but you might not expect the Southwest Taco Salad to be as heart-attack-inducing as it is, with 645 calories, 38.5 grams of fat and 1565 milligrams of sodium.

Wendy’s came in at number three on Dateline NBC’s list of unsanitary fast food restaurants with 206 critical violations in 100 restaurants, including mice droppings on shelves and bare hands in contact with food.

Pizza Hut: More Unholy Food Combinations

Can’t decide between a fatty cheeseburger and a greasy slice of pizza? You’re in luck! At least, you are if you live in the Middle East, where Pizza Hut is offering a cheeseburger-stuffed pizza. British diners have access to an unholy pizza/hot dog mashup. But the Pizza Huts here in the states have plenty of their own unhealthy options, like the Triple Meat Italiano Pizza, which has 1,280 calories and 23 grams of fat.

And though it’s not on this list, Pizza Hut’s competitor Dominos deserves a mention thanks to its Chicken Carbonara Breadbowl Pasta, a giant wad of pizza dough topped with penne pasta, cream and cheese. It’s got 1,480 calories, 56 grams of fat and an amazing 2,220 milligrams of sodium – and yes, it’s meant for one person.

Jack in the Box: Marry Bacon. Or Don’t.

This chain was the setting for one of the most infamous fast-food-poisoning incidents of all time, an outbreak of E. coli that killed four children and sickened hundreds of people in 1993. Jack in the Box has upped its safety measures since then, implementing new testing mechanisms for the bacteria and increasing meat-cooking temperatures. But that doesn’t mean they’ve cleaned up their act altogether. They came in at number 6 on Dateline NBC’s list with 164 critical health and sanitation violations including several complaints of food-borne illness.

Jack in the Box isn’t trying to hide behind a facade of health at least. Ad Week called the chain’s “Marry Bacon” TV commercial” a love song to pig shavings, and that’s probably a nice way of putting it. In 2008, the nonprofit Cancer Project crowned Jack in the Box’s Junior Bacon Cheeseburger “the most unhealthful” menu item available at fast food restaurants in America. It’s got 23 grams of fat, 860 milligrams of sodium and a whole lot of bacon – which, the dietitians behind the list note, is associated with increased colorectal cancer risk.

Long John Silver’s: Stroke in a Cardboard Container

If there’s any food item that should really, really be as fresh as possible when you eat it, it’s probably fish. After all, just a few days past its prime, fish starts to get awfully stinky. So the idea of a fast food restaurant serving fried fish is bad enough as it is – but it might also give you a stroke. A 2010 study linked high rates of fried fish consumption to the stroke belt in the South, where the death rate from strokes is abnormally high. There’s no doubt that fish can be good for you, but not when it’s covered in oily breading. And like many fast food restaurants, Long John Silver’s still uses trans fats to fry its greasy foods. Their food is almost oily enough to make you believe that this satirical story about the chain buying already-oiled fish from the Gulf of Mexico after the BP spill is true.

Photo: keoni101

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Don’t click this link!

The best way to get a small child to want something is to tell them they can’t have it. And since we’re nothing but grown-up children, it works on us too. “Wet Paint – Don’t Touch!” usually elicits a poke with a finger. The more disinterested in us someone appears, the more attractive they usually become. We are fickle creatures, and we easily fall prey to reverse psychology.

In recent weeks Greenpeace has been making a huge number of people feel very stupid. In June they launched a website called Arctic Ready, a spoofed Shell publicity campaign (complete with near-identical website design) built around a user-generated advert competition that went in exactly the direction you’d expect…

What’s really fascinating is that after Greenpeace owned up to the stunt (including a fake Twitter account that is still remaining “in character”) and the stories faded from the front page of new sources, the website managed to fool an entirely new batch of readers and it went viral again. For Travis Nichols of the Greenpeace media team, the message was clear:

People wringing their hands over what is an obviously satirical campaign that rubs them the wrong way for a few seconds before they realize it’s fake pales in comparison with what Shell is doing, the hoax they’re perpetuating on the American public. It’s a creative campaign and we’re giving our supporters a voice to tell Shell what they think.   –  (Forbes) 

Of course that’s what he’d say – but it’s also a campaign designed to whip the public into a mud-slinging frenzy by lying to journalists and media outlets and then, via faked Shell social media accounts, threaten writers with (false) threats of legal action. Where’s the line over which it becomes flat-out defamation? Martin Robbins at the New Statesman thinks Greenpeace has scored such a huge own-goal that the smartest thing Shell could do is ignore it – which is exactly what it appears to be doing.

For a more elegant example of reverse psychology advertising, look to the city of Troy, Michigan. Last year its treasured public library was on the verge of running out of money, a situation a 0.7% citywide tax hike could remedy. In stepped the anti-taxation forces of the Tea Party, putting their substantial weight behind a “No” vote.  With the local election less than a month away, things looked grim. What the library needed was “something attention-getting, something audacious – maybe even vile.”

If you’re not cheering by the end of that video you’re not human – but why is this story far more palatable than Greenpeace’s stunt?

And in either case, do the ends really justify the means?

Image: Rghrous

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They just did it.

Like most modern Olympic Games, London 2012 seems to be as much about advertising and corporate placement as it is about sport and athleticism.

There’s the requirement that any transaction at an Olympic venue is completed by a Visa card; there’s the world’s largest McDonalds located in the middle of the Olympic park; and there’s the army or 300 “brand police” deployed across the UK to protect the integrity of high paying sponsorship deals.

However, a refreshing attempt to reverse the onslaught of monopolistic corporate advertising can be seen on the streets of the Olympic borough of Hackney. To promote their new lightweight Flyknit trainer, which uses woven technology to create a shoe that produces 66% less waste than Nike’s leading running shoe, Nike enlisted a team of creative minds and innovators from the London area.

The team’s goal was to create an advertisement that “illustrates a change you want to see in your streets.” The resulting billboard is a visual sustainability map of the places and people that contribute to a sense of connectivity in the east London neighborhood.

Illustrator Daniel Frost and communications designer Alice Moloney, both Royal College of Arts graduates who were tasked with overseeing the process and final product, saw what they were creating primarily as a piece of collaborative art, and an advertisement only in a secondary sense.

“The advert side of it is really minimal. If you’re going to have a billboard, it might as well be nice and artistic to look at,” Frost said.

The effort was part of a series of creative workshops taking place at Nike’s 1948 London studio this summer as well as in New York City, all intended to “motivate and inform urban regeneration for the local community,” instead of just selling stuff. In addition to the sustainability think tank that Frost and Moloney were a part of, the Flyknit Collective will address issues of design, function, and movement.

Moloney said that the difference between their creation and the plethora of billboards and advertisements plastered all over London is that it was inspired by a group of interested and local minds, rather than a product of a focus group or marketing executives.

“A billboard for me is the most successful way of reaching a lot of people given the scale we want— it’s not so much about the advertising to me as the fact that it’s the appropriate medium,” Moloney said. “With our project though, it makes complete sense that you put the output back into the place that inspired it.”

Creating the map meant defining sustainability itself, which for Moloney, Frost, and the workshop participants was much more about people than objects and materials. The map highlights places like Arnold Circus in Shoreditch, where people commonly eat lunch and gather, and other outdoor spaces that build community like farmers markets.

“Before the project began I knew how to use the word sustainability but I didn’t feel brave enough to use it in a way where I would be asked what it meant,” Moloney said. “I think about it terms of people and the community—people being interconnected, people being inspired by each other. It’s not just about waste and objects but about personal relationships as well.”

The post Nike Enlists Artists for East London’s Sustainability Map appeared first on EcoSalon.

The best of EcoSalon’s stories this week.

French writer Albert Camus was a thoughtful man, and pondered many of the great questions through his strange, beautiful fiction (Why are we here? What does it mean? Why do we keep messing important things up, like our own planet?). Never encountered his work? Let Scott Adelson take you on an introductory tour.

For artists, cardboard is an evocative medium to work with, for its associations with poverty and its ephemeral nature. Cardboard sculpture is powerful – as these recycled cardboard portraits from Ali Golzad so clearly demonstrate.

Ad agencies are experts at getting into our heads and getting us to support brands. We celebrate the work of five advertising campaign experts, and the benefits and hazards of letting them play with our minds.

Anthropologie releases a new collaborative design project meant to shine a light on small fashion brands – and we all cheer? If only it were that simple. Jessica Marati investigates.

We hate plastic bags. No, really, REALLY. But while we might rail against urban tumbleweed in its larvae stage, there’s no denying that carrier bags are hard to give up – and yet that hasn’t stopped Rachelle Strauss from doing just that. So, are you up to the Zero Waste Trash Challenge?

The post The Friday 5: Got a Head Full of Thoughts Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

Ad agencies often work both sides of the spectrum, creating campaigns for the greenest companies as well as the biggest polluters.

While there are some advertising agencies that carefully select their clients based on a certain vision, like social good or environmental friendliness, most simply follow the money. What else but financial motivation could lead to a single agency crafting advertising campaigns for both Monsanto and one of its biggest detractors – Greenpeace?

Let’s take a look at five of the biggest advertising agencies handling some of the world’s top clients, noting the good – campaigns that work to protect the environment or promote social welfare, and the bad – ads for companies that tend to be irresponsible.

Leo Burnett

Leo Burnett’s mission statement focuses on the effects that its advertisements can have on the world at large. “Creativity has the power to transform human behavior. This is the core belief of what we call HumanKind. It’s not about advertising or brand propositions or selling products. It’s about people and purpose. It’s an approach to marketing that serves true human needs, not the other way around. That’s why everything we do for brands is designed with a human purpose in mind… A brand with a true HumanKind purpose can change the world.”

    The Good

• WWF’s Earth Hour Campaign – Leo Burnett won Best International PR Campaign at the Cannes Lions in 2009 for its work with WWF for Earth Hour. The agency set a goal of reaching over 1 billion people across 50+ nations, and managed to turn Earth Hour into the largest social movement in history.
• Amnesty International’s Tyrannybook – Leo Burnett’s Lisbon, Portugal office created a campaign based on a social network dedicated to naming and shaming the world leaders who violate human rights.

    The Questionable

• McDonalds  – Leo Burnett is one of three agencies currently working on international campaigns for the fast-food giant.  While McDonald’s isn’t an egregious polluter or human rights violator, they’re not exactly promoting health and environmental responsibility either.
• Proctor & Gamble – The world’s largest producer of consumer packaged goods, Proctor & Gamble is aggressively greening its operations. However, its product range is full of junk food, toxic artificial fragrances and other products that aren’t exactly eco-friendly, so whether this account belongs under “Good” or “Questionable” is anybody’s guess.

R&R Partners

The CEO of R&R Partners, a Las Vegas, Nevada-based advertising agency, was also an adviser to President Obama’s 2008 campaign. But Billy Vassiliadis’ partner at that same agency, Pete Ernaut, is a staunch Republican. The combination has created a political monster of sorts – a message machine that pits one side against the other in a fight wherein, for R&R’s bottom line at least, there is no loser. Maybe that explains how they can simultaneously promote both human rights and “clean coal.” Tellingly, their “philosophy” reads simply, “We just love to win. Almost as much as we hate to lose.” Their most successful campaign is the now-infamous “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas.”

The Good

• Human Rights Campaign – Working to establish civil rights protection for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community in Nevada, the HRC’s advertisements are managed by R&R Partners.
• Flip the Script Anti-Bullying Campaign – This campaign encourages teens to “flip the script” on bullying by pledging to speak out and address the problem in their own schools and communities. The campaign was inspired by the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, a victim of cyber-bullying.

    The Questionable

• The Clean Coal Campaign – R&R is the agency responsible for the entire ‘Clean Coal’ spin on the polluting, health-draining coal mining industry. Funded by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), which includes big mining and utility companies like Peabody Energy, the multi-million-dollar campaign spreads disinformation about the effects of coal.
•  Utility and mining companies galore – R&R handles advertising campaigns for BP America, Couer D’Alene Mining, Johnson Utilities, the Nevada Mining Association, Newmont Mining and Ridgeway Oil.

BBDO

The “Most Awarded Agency Network in the World” for 5 consecutive years, BBDO is one of the biggest players in the industry with an extensive list of clients including PepsiCo, FedEx, Chevrolet and Nike. They’re the creative folks behind those super-weird Skittles “Taste the Rainbow” ads. BBDO is an international conglomerate with individual agencies located on nearly every continent.

    The Good

• General Electric’s Ecomagination Campaign – BBDO New York spearheaded the interactive ads for GE’s Ecomagination, a portfolio of eco-friendly innovations that meet environmental challenges while also driving economic growth.
• Doppelganger Human to Canine Pairing Software – BBDO is responsible for a fun campaign for Pedigree, Doppelganger. The Doppelganger website connects homeless dogs to their human “doubles” using face-matching software.
• PETA – Say what you will about this controversy-loving animal rights organization, but at least we know that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is looking out for the non-human creatures of the world. BBDO actually aligned with PETA to create an internal awareness program that advocates for the humane treatment of animals in the advertising industry, winning a PETA award for its efforts.
• Greenpeace – BBDO Moscow produced a series of ads for Greenpeace called “Do You Know What You Eat?” The ads are a direct challenge to Monsanto, advocating the labeling of genetically modified ingredients.

    The Questionable

• ExxonMobil – Are the conscious, world-improving campaigns that BBDO produces canceled out by its involvement with one of the world’s most notorious polluters? In November 2011, BBDO won the bulk of ExxonMobil’s global creative business including the management of its corporate image. It’s a highly profitable account that will inevitably require some creative spin and damage control.
• Monsanto – Interestingly, in addition to the Greenpeace ads, BBDO has produced a number of ads for Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller. Roundup has been found to kill human cells and seriously damage the health of all of those animals that PETA cares so much about.

Ogilvy & Mather

With an agency this big, perhaps there’s always bound to be some overlap between smart, conscious advertisements and promotions for some of the world’s most frighteningly unscrupulous corporations. Ogilvy & Mather has 450 offices in 120 countries with more than 18,000 employees and helps craft public personas for companies like American Express, Ford, IBM and Unilever.

    The Good

•  Greenpeace – Ogilvy & Mather has spearheaded a number of campaigns for this renowned environmental organization including “Save Our Seas,” “Disposable Forests,” and a heartstring-tugging ad depicting sinking polar bears in place of glaciers in the Arctic.
• Hopenhagen.org – This global initiative to support climate change action at Copenhagen in 2009 was created for the United Nations, in the hopes of creating a movement. While we all know how little was actually achieved at that summit, the campaign was quite striking.

    The Questionable

• Monsanto – In the past, Ogilvy & Mather has created ads for the Monsanto-owned Equal and NutraSweet artificial sweeteners. Granted, the ads were produced by a small Ogilvy & Mather office in the Philippines, and sweetener ads are not quite the same as promoting the agricultural monopoly’s ads for genetically modified foods and toxic Roundup herbicide. But it’s still Monsanto.
• Nestle – Ogilvy & Mather handles international marketing for Nestle, a brand mostly known for its slave-labor chocolate. Nestle also produces bottled water by exploiting and monopolizing pristine springs in rural communities. The company’s pumping has significantly added aquifers in a number of cities including Mecosta, Michigan.

Draftfcb

Another one of the world’s largest advertising networks, Draftfcb is perhaps best known for its many fast food and junk food advertisements for brands like Oreo, KFC and Taco Bell. It also handles the promotions for a number of massive pharmaceutical companies like Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline.

    The Good

• The Shelter Pet Project – Created for the Ad Council in partnership with the Humane Society of the United States and Maddie’s Fund, this campaign aims to encourage the adoption of pets in shelters.

    The Questionable

• Dow – How can anyone make a notorious polluter look good? Draftfcb is charged with that daunting task, and has produced a number of advertisements that attempt to brand Dow as a scientific innovator. Dow Chemical is responsible for toxic environmental pollution in a number of communities such as Midland, Michigan, where rivers downstream of its plant are contaminated with chlorinated furans and dioxins. Plus, Dow has refused to take any responsibility for the health and environmental effects of the deadly Bhopal gas disaster after acquiring the Union Carbide company.
• Merck – This pharmaceutical company may just balance itself out in the long run. Though it recently had to pay a $1.5 million penalty for violations of federal environmental laws like the Clean Air Act, and paid a $20 million penalty for polluting drinking water in Philadelphia, it’s also gaining a lot of positive attention for its efforts to green itself internally and make its operations more sustainable.
• Pfizer – This pharmaceutical giant has come under fire for keeping its HIV/AIDS-related drugs out of reach of the world’s poor, violating the Clean Air Act and allegedly testing its drugs on poor, critically ill Nigerian children.
• Nestle – Draftfcb is another ad agency handling ads for this food and bottled water producer.

The post Ad Agency Awareness: Who’s Conscious About Their Clients? appeared first on EcoSalon.

SeriesInundated with marketing messages, Americans are tricked into believing products equal happiness.

Editor’s Note: This four-part series from a leading industry insider is authored under the pseudonym “Louise Lagosi” for the individual’s protection. The series addresses our engagement with consumer culture and how marketing and advertising can manipulate us – and society as a whole.

Studies On The Development Of Consumerism

“All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality.” -Alfred L. Kroeber, The Superorganic

If you took a time machine back to 200 years ago, you would see families living modest lives: busy working at home tending their vegetable patches or livestock, cooking and eating family dinners, making their own soaps, sewing and mending their own clothes, using what they had down to the last scrap, and buying as few products as they possibly could to maintain the comforts of their lives on their modest incomes.

Fast forward to today, where most American households buy everything they own from a store and consume far more than they actually need; nowadays, community refers to our Facebook friends, we home-make almost nothing for own consumption, we have no idea where our food or other products come from and we dispose of barely used products regularly, in order to replace them with something new for the sake of newness. We’ve become a consumer society which currently consumes approximately 1 1/2 times the amount of resources that the planet can produce annually.

What’s driving our culture toward consuming is a recipe based on keeping up with the Joneses, a rise in societal shopaholism and our basic survival skills at work within society. It’s also safe to say that in the name of industrial prosperity, the economies of Western civilization have pushed us to this point.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that in the eyes of capitalism, we’ve become trapped. Industry marketers and advertising experts have been able to turn our own survival skills against us in the name of turning a profit.

Consumer Grooming
Ever catch your mind wandering while looking at a fashion magazine or a sexy billboard, thinking, “I wish I could have that…” These thoughts may not in fact be yours, rather a direct product of the marketing industry’s labors to grab your attention. Consumer grooming is the method of applying psychologically embedded imagery, strategically placed where they will be seen by the masses, to influence the purchasing choices of the global population. Our human desires to be loved, respected and admired are played upon through airbrushed images modeling sex, status, wealth, and beauty aspirations. This is not a new thing, it’s been in the works since before the Victorian Period.

A portrait of the Astor family stiffly posing, shows the idyllic life of the extremely rich during the Industrial Revolution. While age perhaps has made this image more elegant to our modern eyes, this would be the Victorian equivalent to today’s Kardashian family Christmas card.

Madeline Levine, modern day psychologist and author of The Price of Privilege, describes in her book the negative effects affluence has on children growing up in wealthy families due to dramatic changes in American culture as “a shift away from values of community, spirituality, and integrity, and toward competition, materialism and disconnection.”

The Psychological Underpinnings Of Advertisements

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate“. -Victor Lebrow, Economist, 1955

Consumerism has long had intentional underpinnings. In the 1890s, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen gave sweeping attacks on production for profit, propelling the rise in conspicuous consumerism in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. He noted a spreading consumer trend that appeared during the Industrial Revolution with the emergence of nouveau riche moguls who were displaying their wealth and social standing prominently through conspicuous consumption of material goods, ultimately evoking envy among their neighbors.

Apparently their neighbors were taking the bait, right along with the growing middle class. Back in 1899, Veblen, scathingly noted a general trend in society that people were willing to give up their quality of living, their health/family/spiritual life balance, in order to appear wealthy through their dress.

For all his studies and reports, whom did his theories aid the most? It was the industrial businessmen who had much to gain from reading his findings even if he carped at the wealth throughout his work. Many of the conclusions he came to showed that given the opportunity, society could easily be encouraged to consume aggressively through different forms of peer pressure. His theories outlined how wasteful habits of over-consumption was spreading, giving industries, like the fashion and beauty product industries, the key to pushing huge amounts of unnecessary products to unconscious consumers.

By the 1920s, economists such as Paul Nystrom theorized that lifestyle changes brought on by the industrial age were inducing a “philosophy of futility” in the masses, which would only increase fashionable consumption. By the 1930s, advertising executives in a budding industry realized that they could capitalize on the social phenomenon of consumerism by encouraging consumers to compete with their neighbors for social status. In 1932, Earnest Elmo Calkins, a leading ad executive noted to colleagues that “consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use.”

Study after study has been written about our social tendency to conform to a collective wasteful behavior. While these studies do not seem to be reaching most of the population to educate, economists and businessmen have been eager to read them, continually thrilled to learn more about the harnessing potential behind the phenomenon of consumerism.

The Arsenal Of Advertisement Aimed At Consumers

The advertising, media, and marketing industries work to create and place ads in front of the people who are most likely to imitate and be influenced by it. Namely this would be people interested in anything related to societal activities: those who follow culture through magazines, TV, movies, or by surfing the net, live in an urban environment, or who at very least, listen to the radio.

In order to do accomplish their goal, the ad industry has come up with continually innovative methods that encourage the social drive to “keep up with the Joneses.” Celebrities since time immemorial have been brought in, images of excessive materialism carefully placed for target audiences to see and in turn, a consumer response to go shopping. This method of advertising has been highly effective at driving sales and has become one of the most effective forms of marketing excessively used today.

Vintage Elizabeth Taylor selling hair cream with a brand slogan attached, appealed to women that wanted to have hair like the  iconic Taylor. They didn’t mention that the cream is made with toxic chemicals or that you might need a team of hair stylists along with the cream to achieve her coif.

And Michael Jordan probably sold more shoes for Nike than anyone in history, while making millions doing it. Like Louis Vuitton’s Tribute Patchwork Bag, Nike turned Jordan’s namesake shoes into a “limited edition” to drive consumers into fearing that they might not get a pair. This effectively allowed the company to raise the prices of the products incredibly to meet their high demand, adding consumer status and “value” to the shoes. Quite often the Air Jordan shoes would be back-ordered for months or until the next edition was released.

The fashion media even invented their own celebrities. In the 1980s and 90s supermodels were born when the industries realized that they could draw attention to images featuring favorite “iconic” models, unusual in their looks, who had loads of attitude and glamour. Glamazons like Cindy Crawford, Naomi Cambell, Claudia Schiffer, and Linda Evangelista became household names and were easy to recognize in fashion spreads.

Women fell in love with the images of their beautiful “lifestyles” portrayed in fashion magazines and they achieved celebrity status for their pretty faces and extraordinary physiques. Women poured over their favorite fashion magazines: playing name that model, studying their make-up, hair and styling in an effort to emulate their style, beauty, and allure. Completely distracted by the pretty faces adorned with cosmetics and designer products, the under laying message that was embedded in the images easily sunk in. Of course, one would have to buy the products these beauties were modeling in order to emulate them.

Reality TV shows, featuring made-up, pseudo-celebs, have been devised specifically for product placement.

Superficiality, rage, greed, jealousy, envy, and competitiveness are now gratuitously displayed, on shows such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians, America’s Top Model, and Jersey Girls. All three shows invite viewers to embrace petty drama into their own lives and suggest that celebrity status might follow, even for people who completely lack talent.

The underlying message in all this media-based imagery is, “If you buy our products, you too will be beautiful and admired,” but the obvious question begging to be asked should be, “What are we hiding?”

Image: Tinou bao

The post Fashion Marketing 101: The Psychology Behind Retail Happiness appeared first on EcoSalon.

Editor’s Note: This four-part series from a leading industry insider is authored under the pseudonym “Louise Lagosi” for the individual’s protection. The series addresses our engagement with consumer culture and how marketing and advertising can manipulate us – and society as a whole.

Whether or not you are aware of it, this image of celebrity Jennifer Aniston is embedded with psychological material. Her honey-blond hair and softly-lit, Photoshopped face is childlike and dewy. Her intense attention to the money in her hand while clutching her designer bag loaded with more cash oozes power, sex, wealth, and control. The photograph even uses markers to pinpoint these little features while at the same time promoting the items you might want to buy if you wish to look like this. Celebrity, eternal youth, power, wealth, sex: That’s what this carefully articulated image has to offer up for sale.

But at face value, what is it really giving you?

Now, look at these photographs. What do you see? Realize that any previously presented Anistonian aspirations are absolute nonsense. She’s an attractive woman to be sure, but she’s only human. Even Jennifer Aniston doesn’t live the life that Jennifer Aniston leads in the above glossy magazine image.

Presenting Jennifer looking average or even shabby is playing up the competitive side of our human natures, getting us to compare ourselves to her, picking her apart, and at the same time picking ourselves apart through the comparison. We’re being primed to react defensively to the first image: Go shopping. But, at the end of the day, what does Jennifer Aniston have to do with our personal lives, and why do we find ourselves looking at her and other celebrity personalities with the obsession that we do?

Stuck In An Advertising Ambush

Are we truly tired of the messages that ads and the media are sending us? If you’re falling out of love with your relationship to fashion and shopping in general, join the club. It’s still a small one, but it is rapidly growing as our living spaces and surroundings are cluttered with stuff while our credit cards are maxed out. We need very little and yet we seem to want so much. And everywhere we look we see both evasive and aggressive marketing campaigns which bombard us with advertisements on a daily basis, suggesting that we need to buy more to gain beauty, glamor and fabulosity. In fact, if fashion were a drug, it would be almost impossible to kick the habit; there are pushers on every corner.

President of the Marketing Firm Yankelovich, Jay Walker-Smith, stated in a CBS news article, “It’s a non-stop blitz of advertising messages. Everywhere we turn we’re saturated with advertising messages trying to get our attention. It seems like the goal of most marketers and advertisers nowadays is to cover every blank space with some kind of brand logo or a promotion or an advertisement.”

Research from the late 1950s to the 1970s has shown that the average person 40 to 50 years ago was exposed to somewhere between 78-500 ads a day. Walker Smith points out that today we’re exposed to as many as 5,000.

NYC The Blog reports on the first NYC subway train completely wrapped in advertising

The tipping point is coming. Do-not-call. Adblock. “We have to screen it out because we simply can’t absorb that much information. We can’t process that much data,” Walker-Smith notes, “and no surprise, consumers are reacting negatively to the kind of marketing blitz; the kind of super saturation of advertising that they’re exposed to on a daily basis.”

There’s even an advertising company, cleverly called Wizmark, that’s putting advertisements in urinals. “You can’t look left. You can’t look right. You have to look at the ad and listen to it,” Richard Deutch, CEO of Wizmark brags with tongue firmly set in cheek.

Buying Into Luxury Brand Ads

Over the last 20 years, the fashion industry has employed numerous marketing tactics to drive consumers into a shopping frenzy, making industry giants enormously rich. Investing in “brand strengthening,” companies cultivate consumer loyalty which equates to high numbers in sales, quite often, from returning customers who have bought into the message that the brand’s advertisements are selling.

Take, for example, one of the most competitive luxury brands in the world: Louis Vuitton. In 2010, Louis Vuitton spent some $14 million on advertising during the first quarter. Their ad campaign appeared all over the pages of luxury lifestyle magazines, news publications, and across the internet where affluent shoppers would see them while shopping. Surprisingly, it was not enough to stimulate their consumer demand because in 2011, during the same quarter, they increased their budget to $22 million ( a 57% budget increase). The steep increase in ad spend could hardly be considered a coincidence.

The above ads were just about everywhere you looked in New York City during the spring of 2011. Louis Vuitton employed a small army of campaign advertisements to seduce luxury consumers back after the Great Recession.

In 2010, Consumer Reports revealed a noticeable trend that consumers were changing their habits: Shopping less, saving more, and choosing products that they equate with craftsmanship, practicality, and social values (think TOMS shoes) rather than luxury status “bling”. Bling is out. The reports also revealed that this new trend was not likely to go away anytime soon; it wasn’t merely a reaction to economic pressure, this new consumer was an entirely different beast living by a new set of rules. All of those advertisements were the velvet-gloved iron fist of Louis Vuitton attempting to coax the mass of luxury and aspirational consumers back into their former position of brand submission.

If you took eight LV samples and stuck them in a trash compactor, out would pop this expensive little piece of “limited edition” baggage called the LV Tribute Patchwork Bag. This particular bag might have cost approximately $3000 to make, but was sold exclusively to only 20 customers (worldwide) for $42,000 a pop in select stores.

What’s $36 million in advertising? Chump change to a company like Louis Vuitton that wants to ensure a dominant market position doesn’t erode. (In 2011, LVMH, the company that owns LV, boasted in their company quarterly report net profits of over $2 billion in fashion and leather goods sales alone.)

If you’re selling logo-covered, luxury-status, vinyl-canvas handbags with the words “Louis Vuitton” stamped on them, you can charge consumers a premium. The price tag we see can be anywhere between 250-1400% of the expense of making even a very well-made bag. The more expensive price tags (in the $1000+ range) subsidize the basic vinyl tote bags Louis Vuitton offers in the hundreds, allowing the company to lure the aspirational middle class with “affordable” luxury.

To the luxury fashion consumer, the primary value is not in the the design, the materials, or even the quality of labor that goes into the bag – it’s in the social status that the advertisements and exclusive products offer to customers. And over the past 20 years, while there have been many consumers that have bought right into the dream, there are those conscious customers who have simply walked away. After all, who really needs another logo-plastered tote when there are already so many of them out there?

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