Lots of interesting bits and pieces in the Tip Jar this week:

• Dove has just unveiled the newest piece of its Campaign for Real Beauty. Its “Beauty Has No Age Limit” ads for Dove’s pro-age skin and hair care products are doing for older women what its “Real Women Have Real Curves” campaign and Evolution video did for normal looking younger women. The ads feature real women in their 50s and 60s who bare all for the camera to make the point that aging is not a bad thing. It’s not exactly a social marketing campaign, since at the end of the day they are still trying to sell a product, but the messages these ads promote are definitely working towards creating healthy social norms.

• In a sad social marketing-related link to the shootings in Philadelphia earlier this week, one of the victims, Mark Norris, was the head of the ad agency that created the controversial “Have You Been Hit?” HIV prevention campaign that portrayed young black men in the cross-hairs of a gun. How horribly ironic. My heart goes out to his and the other victims’ family and friends.

• Weight loss advocate Julia Havey is calling Coca Cola’s bluff on their My Code Rewards program, saying that in order to win any of the top prizes participants have to drink a lethal amount of soda to amass the correct number of points before the end of the promotion. She has filed a legal petition against Coca Cola to stop the program.
  

  In order to be rewarded with the “Record like an idol at a recording studio in Los Angeles, California” reward, one needs to procure and redeem 41,600 points which would necessitate the consumption of 49,920 bottles of Coca Cola Product which, in the case of a non-diet product containing sugar, would give rise to the necessity to consume approximately 7,238,400 calories, which, in turn, would cause a human being to gain during the life span of the program approximately 2,068 pounds. On a daily basis, a participant would be required to consume one hundred fifty-one (151) 12-ounce bottles of Coca Cola, being a lethal consumption of the product.

• Tateru Nino of Second Life provided some examples of both individual and organizational aid efforts going on in the virtual world. Besides groups of friends banding together to help the people behind the avatars who have real-world medical problems, Oxfam, the Red Cross, and Alcoholics Anonymous are operating within Second Life.

• Have you seen the Indexed blog? Jessica Hagy uses Venn diagrams, graphs, geometry and other visual relationships jotted on index cards to make sense of the world in a clever and humorous way. Here are some of my recent favorites.

• The National Media Education Conference will be happening in St. Louis, Missouri on June 22-26. Sponsored by the Alliance for a Media Literate America, the theme will be “iPods, Blogs and Beyond: Evolving Media Literacy for the 21st Century.”

• MarketingSherpa has a great article on how to start a cause marketing program based on the Komen Foundation’s experience. Some of the most helpful tips include:
  • Tally your nonprofit’s marketing assets — what you can offer a potential partner in terms of exposure or other benefits.
  • Find a niche you can own, then find corporations who want to be there too.
  • Land one good partnership, make it work and use those results to demonstrate the value of a relationship to other corporations.
  • Seek new partnerships that expand your reach and give the partner a unique marketing position, not ones that duplicate existing campaigns.

  The article is only accessible until February 23, so make sure you go read it now.

Photo Credit: Jay Dubya

Technorati Tags: marketing, dove, pro-age, Coca-Cola, Second Life

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