Cause Marketing - & ‘The Life-Saving Cable' | ...Gasp!

Cause Marketing

& ‘The Life-Saving Cable'

Hello again, one and all.I hope you’re all having a marvelous week. It’s a little warm in the Gasp office I must say. Unfortunately, living in a characterful Victorian building means AC is out of the question, but a very generous purchase of desk fans by management has certainly eased our perspiration issues.

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I wanted to get him a glass of water and to rub his back gently, comforting him that one day all our first-world problems will be solved.

We actually had a client in the other day who, during introductory small-talk said these words;

“They’ve turned the air-conditioning up wayyyyy too high in our office; it’s really annoying.”

I wanted to get him a glass of water and to rub his back gently, comforting him that one day all our first-world problems will be solved. But he’s a client so I just said (without even a tincture of sarcasm);

“God, that must be a massive pain the arse!”

Anyway, I thought after the last blog, about my little day out with Giles at The Drum Live, I might mention it again. Just to say how grateful I am that they’ve mentioned me in one of their articles about the day, it’s a lovely gesture and almost makes up for the fact they didn’t put my face in the big collage on the inside cover of the magazine.

The article ‘what mentions my blog’ accompanies this video from the day, which heavily features our august Creative Director…

In other other news, I thought I’d share how taken I am with this campaign from Y&R Moscow, for NAR Mobile.

You see I’d hate to be accused of having a London or even Western-centric view of the world of marketing, so this campaign comes from Azerbaijan.

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With the proliferation of apps for almost everything, and the fact we’re using smartphones more and more, battery life is struggling to keep up. If you haven’t already, watch the recent ‘Wall-Huggers’ Samsung ad, which plays on exactly that issue.

For NAR Mobile to make the comparison between smartphone battery life and blood donations does admittedly seem a little superficial.

However, off the back of this - Azerbaijan has more blood donations, and NAR Mobile has an enormous amount of goodwill and brand awareness. Which must surely transpose into an increase in sales. Everyone’s a winner!

It’s a really great example of cause marketing, which is an interesting ethical matter I think. When the end goal is to increase their profits, to what extent should brands ‘piggy-back’ their products onto big humanitarian causes, when those causes benefit too?

I don’t have an answer to that really. I’ll only say that proportionality must surely play a part. By that I mean the profits made by brands when cause marketing must significantly mirror the benefit to the cause being publicised.

After all, no one in their right mind would support a brand using say, Cancer Research in all their marketing comms, if it results in £500 for Cancer Research and £1,000,000 for the brand.

…although you could plausibly argue that is 500 quid that Cancer Research wouldn’t have had otherwise…and every little helps…I said I don’t have the answer alright!

While I’m wrestling with my ‘General Studies A-level style’ ethical questions, I’ll leave you with this print ad from BBR Saatchi & Saatchi for Ford Israel, which is just plain awesome…

Enjoy the rest of the week.

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