The chattering classes were all abuzz yesterday about a sponsored post on everyone’s favorite site to visit for kitty pic listicles and condescending literary rants. (Wait, what?)

Here’s the story: In an amusingly blatant attempt to push its talking points to those young folks who will determine the future of politics in this country, conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation illustrated its distaste for the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, with BuzzFeed‘s trademark combination of one-liners and GIFs.

OMG CUTE LOL! But will it work?

We say meh. :-/

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When a company’s primary audience is under the age of 12, will the public expect that company to promote only products and behaviors deemed “healthy” by third-party standards or trust it to develop its own?

To put it another way: does Cookie Monster really need to eat vegetables?

Senators and advocacy groups pushing to limit snack food ads on kids’ programs celebrated last year when The Walt Disney Company, partnering with Michelle Obama‘s “Let’s Move” anti-obesity campaign, promised to stop running spots for foods that don’t meet suggested federal nutrition standards by 2015. Disney’s chairman said the decision was “about smart business.”

Despite pressure to follow suit, Nickelodeon has chosen to continue using its own internal benchmarks—which earned praise from the same senators and advocacy groups—when deciding which food ads to run.

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For about 70 cents, you can buy a soda (regular or diet)…

No industry relies more heavily on the public’s good will than the non-profit sector, which ostensibly exists for the sole purpose of serving the greater good. For this reason, inflammatory reports about how some of America’s biggest charities spend their money present professional and ethical challenges for crisis comms experts.

50 foundations around the country desperately need some good PR right now after a joint project by the Tampa Bay Times, CNN, and The Center for Investigative Reporting named them among the worst in the country for doing little beyond “turn[ing] donations into profit.”

The saddest part about this story is the fact that most of the groups on the list claim to support children, veterans, cancer victims, and public servants like cops and state troopers. We’d like to think that Americans will be quick to punish any charity suspected of exploiting sick kids.

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The ANAR Foundation, a Spanish child-advocacy organization, faced a challenge when trying to create an ad that could offer help to children suffering from abuse, without alerting potential abusers (i.e. adults) to their message. The solution came in the form of lenticular printing, a technology that allows printed images to create an illusion of depth or, in this case, the ability to change or move as the image is viewed from different angles.

The result was a simple but powerful ad that successfully sends entirely different messages to adults and children. Anyone shorter than 4-foot-3 sees a child with bruising on his face, the hotline phone number, and a message that reads, “If somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you.” Meanwhile, anyone above that height simply sees the unblemished face of a child and the message, “Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.” A powerful metaphor made literal in a simple yet hard-to-ignore fashion.

The agency behind the ad, Grey Spain, has also released this video explaining the campaign’s intentions, and how the idea for the high-tech, dual-message poster was born.

Many comments on the video pointed out that the video’s release may have robbed the just-for-kids message of its secrecy (something that occurred to us as well). In response, Grey posted a pitch-perfect statement, explaining that their true objective was to raise awareness of child abuse, and to get the hotline phone number circulating in public:

“Many thanks for your comments, we really appreciate them. Anar Foundation counts only on few resources to raise awareness of their phone number to denounce children abuse. However, thanks to media coverage and all the comments on social networks, the campaign has achieved its main objective: Raise awareness of the Foundation and their phone number 116 111 for children and teenagers at risk. We encourage you to continue to disseminate Fundacion Anar task through your likes, shares and comments.”

We’re all rooting for America’s cities these days.  They’re coming back. Maybe it’s the sports, the aversion to lengthy car commutes or the nightlife, or a stubborn pride dating back to the classic 1970s the classic Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

After bouncing around several other American cities, Aaron Perlut settled in St. Louis with his family, and along with partners Brian Cross and Andy Barnett, headquartered their agency Elasticity there.

Perlut in particular believes wholeheartedly that the city doesn’t suck. The need to plant deep roots in the community to grow the firm and the fondness for his region spurred a Forbes.com column to fight against the notion of suckitude. With 158,000 views and counting, “St. Louis Doesn’t Suck” became  jumping off point for a not-for-profit crowdsourced and crowdfunded platform Rally Saint Louis to address the city’s reputation issues. The column begins as a rant and ends as an outline for an integrated marketing plan, complete with SEO kicker.

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We talked last week about a company’s major PR failure in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. Now, we’d like to share an epic PR win inspired by the same tragedy.

Shortly after the attack that killed three and wounded over 180 at last Monday’s Boston Marathon, Mayor Thomas M. Menino and Governor Deval Patrick contacted Jim Gallagher, executive VP of John Hancock (which has title-sponsored the race for years) in an effort to brainstorm ways to provide assistance to the victims.

At 10 a.m. the next morning, Mr. Gallagher got on a conference call with Mike Sheehan and Karen Kaplan, CEO and president of Boston ad agency Hill Holiday. Within hours of that call, the agency created One Fund Boston, a foundation designed to help victims.

During the 10 a.m conference call in which Mr. Gallagher promised John Hancock would donate $1 million to get the ball rolling, the Mayor’s office requested it be able to announce the creation of the fund at a 5 p.m. press conference. That left Holiday Hill seven hours to create a charity from scratch.

Communicating mostly via text message, the agency got to work. Read more

So it’s the 21st century, and lots of brands want the public to know that they’re invested in the most powerful social movements of the day — be they environmental, ethical, or cultural. We also know that audience engagement is often the most important element of a successful social media-powered PR campaign. Social@Ogilvy recently conducted a study and published a white paper on the phenomenon, and we had a chance to talk to the firm’s “Global MD” John Bell about its conclusions.

What inspired you to conduct this study?

Our original motivation came from working with major brands on the idea of creating a movement around a major issue that both coincides with business goals and serves the larger social good. The Pepsi Refresh project, for example, not only benefited the company but also the communities that received funding. The “members project” from American Express was similar.

We’ve been designing big social programs for a while, but when considering the word “movement” we asked: how big is big — especially when the idea is centered around a brand?

What were the study’s parameters?

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PR wars over food safety, labeling, and questionable ingredients have been raging as of late, and big brands have increasingly found themselves on the wrong side of standoffs involving concerned citizens armed with petitions, boycotts and Facebook pages. As we all know, the way these brands respond often determines whether such situations become opportunities for positive PR or full-blown damage control disasters.

Now it’s Kraft‘s turn.

Food blogger Vani Hari (AKA “Food Babe“), along with with Lisa Leake of 100daysofrealfood.com, recently filed a petition asking the company to remove potentially harmful dyes yellow 5 and yellow 6 from its childhood dinner staple Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. Though the petition has already garnered over 270,000 signatures, Hari decided to take her fight to the streets (literally) in an effort to earn more attention and support for her cause.

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If you haven’t seen the photo to the left, it’s a safe bet you haven’t been on Facebook in the past 24 hours.

The Human Rights Campaign’s drive for marriage equality has taken social media by storm as the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Proposition 8 case. The social campaign launched around 1 p.m. EST Monday afternoon, when the organization changed its Facebook profile picture to the logo at left.

So what was this all about? “Red is a symbol for love, and that’s what marriage is all about,” HRC spokesperson Charlie Joughin told MSNBC.com on Tuesday. “We wanted to give people an opportunity to show their support for marriage equality in a public and visible way.”

Even if you failed to log into Facebook, celebrities and politicians alike made sure their Twitter followers knew all about the campaign:

Use this photo for your profile pics this week in support of marriage equality during these very… instagram.com/p/XVCe0XRsXT/

— Lance Bass (@LanceBass) March 26, 2013

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In case you didn’t realize it, today is “World Water Day“, an event first created by the United Nations in 1993 to bring attention to the chronic lack of sanitary drinking water that affects one billion people in the developing world. charity: water, a New York nonprofit founded in 2006 to more directly address that very problem, has displayed its mastery of social media on several fronts today, and we’d like to review them briefly.

• Public events: the organization created a “Waterwalk” event in Times Square and other locations around the world in order to highlight the fact that many poor individuals have to walk several miles a day carrying heavy “jerry cans” to secure water that might not even be safe to drink. The org set these cans on the sidewalk to encourage the public to “walk in their shoes”, then posted photos of related events from Paris to midtown Manhattan on its Instagram page.

• The “Pledge Your Birthday” project: Here charity: water created a nice viral promo campaign by encouraging fans to promise that, when their next birthday comes around, they will create their own social “fundraising page” with the charity’s help and encourage all their friends to make donations. Tens of thousands of people have already done it, and the average user raises several hundred dollars for the cause. That’s a nice chunk of change.

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