Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law that bans ”propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” and threatens openly gay or “pro-gay” citizens and foreigners with fines, arrests and possible jail time. Another new law restricts adoptions of Russian children by people in countries that allow same-sex marriage.

With the 2014 Winter Olympics set to take place in Sochi, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) says it has received assurances ”from the highest level of government in Russia that the legislation will not affect those attending or taking part in the Games.” It pledged to ensure there would be no discrimination against athletes, officials, spectators or the media during the games.

Many equal-rights activists are unimpressed with the IOC’s response, and feel that whether or not the laws directly affect the games is far from the point. ”They should be advocating for the safety of all LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) people in Russia, not simply those visiting for the Olympics,” said Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin. ”Rescinding this heinous law must be our collective goal.”

In order to make their voices heard, activists have been writing petitions and staging boycotts.

The “Dump Russian Vodka” campaign, started by internationally syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, has prompted bars across the US, UK, Canada and Australia to stop serving Russian brands like Stolichnaya. In response, Stolichnaya’s CEO Val Mendeleev wrote an open letter last week condemning the recent laws and reaffirming the brand’s commitment to the LGBT community. The brand’s website has also undergone an overhaul, and now features a rainbow block of text boasting that the brand “stands strong and proud with the global LGBT community against the attitude and actions of the Russian government.” (We’d call this a winning damage control response) Read more

Did you know that your soda can aspires to become part of a sports stadium and your empty plastic bottle dreams of contributing to an ocean-side park bench? Well, they do, and you can help them reach their lofty goals by doing one simple thing: recycling them.

At least that’s the message sent by Pereira & O’Dell‘s new pro-bono campaign for the Ad Council and Keep American Beautiful, “I Want to Be Recycled.”

The PSA featuring the bottle opens with the evocative line, “They said I couldn’t dream. Called me a piece of trash and swore that’s all I’d ever be.” The viewer then watches this tenacious little dreamer overcome its seemingly hopeless start inside a trash can, and follows it across city streets, down lonely highways, and through rugged terrain until it finally reaches its destination and becomes what it “always wanted to be.” The spot ends with the tag line “Give your garbage another life. Recycle,” and shows the address for IWantToBeRecycled.org.

Basically, think “Where the Heart Is” condensed into 30 seconds and starring a milk bottle instead of Natalie Portman. Read more

Fans of the The CW’s The Vampire Diaries may fantasize about being bitten by one (or both of) the smoldering, undead Salvatore brothers, but being bitten by a tick? Decidedly less sexy.

Which is why Candice Accola, who plays Caroline on the hit series, is helping the Tick-Borne Disease Alliance (TBDA) – a national nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness, supporting initiatives and promoting advocacy to find a cure for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases — launch its new grassroots campaign, Bite Back for a Cure.

The online portion of the campaign, led by Accola, aims to accumulate “a national video quilt” of individual statements given by people whose lives have been affected by tick-borne diseases. This “video quilt” will be sent to state and federal legislators, encouraging them to support Lyme-disease legislation.

The campaign urges supporters to visit BiteBackForACure.org, where they can download and print advocacy signs printed with phrases like “Be the Change,” “Take a Stand,” “Change the System” and “Support Research.” From there, participants can take their own photo with the sign of their choice and upload it to the TBDA website or share it via social media. TBDA will then compile all the photos from across the country into the “video quilt.” Read more

Remember Superstorm Sandy? Though it’s been a long time since the devastating storm made headlines, it remains fresh in the minds of east coasters still recovering from the punishing winds, rain and surf unleashed upon them last fall.

In an effort to re-rally support for those still struggling to put their lives back together, Toyota released the below video last week, titled “Meals Per Hour.” For every time the video is viewed (up to 1 million views), Toyota has pledged to provide a meal to Sandy victims still struggling to feed their families. As of yesterday — one week after the video’s release — the short documentary-style film had already generated 892,000 views/meals. As of this writing, that number has jumped to 905, 695.

In the video, we see that for many in the Rockaways of New York, life has yet to return to normal. We are introduced to the Metro Food Distribution center, a local food bank struggling to provide enough food to those who need it. One volunteer says that even though workers are dedicated to providing assistance, part of the problem is that “there isn’t really a system set up…if you have a good system, the work takes care of itself.”

Enter Toyota, which has had a fair amount of practice creating efficient systems (cars don’t just manufacture themselves, you know). The Toyota Production System (TPS) is based on the idea that “the summation of many, many small, cheap improvements can have a big impact.” One Toyota representitive, who shares TPS with non-profits around the country, explains, “These basic principles of the Toyota Production System apply to any kind of process — it doesn’t have to be manufacturing.” Read more

There’s nothing like a brisk walk outdoors: the sun shining on your face, the birds chirping in the trees, and the dog poo squishing under your shoe.

As avid walkers, we find ourselves griping about inconsiderate dog-walkers on a regular basis. If you’re taking your dog for a stroll, bring a bag. It’s not that hard. No one is buying the oh-so-apologetic “I had no idea he would do something like this, so I find myself utterly unprepared” shrug you try to give passersby as your dog proceeds to squat down in the middle of the walkway.

But since signage doesn’t seem to shame offending parties into cleaning up after their pets, it appeared little could be done to cut down on the number of canine-created landmines pedestrians must dodge on a daily basis.

Enter McCann Madrid.

The town of Brunete, on the outskirts of Madrid, teamed up with the agency to tackle the problem on a limited budget. The agency’s solution was to employ 20 volunteers to patrol the streets, watching for dog owners who skirted their poop-and-scoop responsibilities.

When an offending party was spotted, a volunteer would approach the unsuspecting dog owner, and engage them in a friendly conversation about their pooch. Then, using only the name and breed of the dog in question, they looked up the owner’s address via the Town Hall pet census databases, packaged up the abandoned dog poop as “Lost Property,” and returned it to the guilty party via courier.

Gross? Totally. Creepy in a stalker-ish sort of way? Definitely. But it’s pretty hard to argue with the results: According to the agency, there has been a 70% drop in the amount of poop on Brunete’s streets. 70 percent!

Anyone who has attended a business meeting in the past decade has witnessed the word synergy being passed around the conference table like a collection basket at church. People just throw money at it. It’s one of those buzzwords that professionals rely on to sound informed, enlightened and compelling. It is also a word that represents a lucrative business strategy.

The savvy public is familiar with product placements and the idea of bundling multiple business resources and advertising assets to achieve a collective gravitational pull that people can’t resist. And that is exactly what Walgreens, the “All-Star Celebrity Apprentice,” Penn Jillet, Trace Adkins, Donald Trump and other business partners and celebrities are relying on to promote their causes: synergy.

And, if one is to go by social media chatter, it appears to be working. The collective sum of these disparate parts has the public going to Walgreens and testing which flavor they prefer, Jillet’s “Magic Swurtle” or Adkins’ “Maple Macadamia Mash Up.” Though the public may grow weary of contrived “reality” TV shows and stars such as Gary Busey (seriously though, how can you not watch that guy), it never seems to tire of charity and the way helping others makes people feel. And that’s a good thing.

Anyone out there try one of these ice cream flavors? Which do you prefer?

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 know sex sells, and we’ve seen non-profits from PETA to the American Public Health Association use provocative tactics to garner attention and raise money, but porn website Come4.org is hoping to corner the market on the idea of being bad to do a little good.

The adult website, which describes itself as “the first user-generated, nonprofit pornography site devoted to funding charitable and ethically driven projects” is being unveiled with the help of Being, the Paris office of ad agency TBWA. The agency created a 90-second promotional video called “The Lover”, which introduces the world to Come4′s first charitable initiative—helping to fund the Asta Philpot Foundation, which is committed to raising public awareness about the sexual rights of disabled people.

Come4 describes its mission and intentions this way:

“‘Sex’ is the top word searched on the Internet. With nearly billions of yearly revenues, the sex industry is one of the greatest markets online. Unfortunately, it is also one of the less ethical and transparent ones…

The prevailing model is finalized to business, and thus it systematically aims at subjugating our sexual imagination to marketing standards. As a result, instead of reflecting the natural plurality of human sexuality, much of today’s online sexual contents foster a one-dimensional perspective which is often fake, violent, macho-centered, and in many cases barely legal. We believe that we, as a self-aware community, can do better than this, and that time has come to rethink critically the relationship of online pornography and society.

With Come4 we aim to ignite a new sexual revolution, one that has at its core people instead of money, respect for diversity instead of uniformity, and solidarity instead of selfishness. Our goal is to devolve at least 1 percent of the total revenue of the online sex industry to support ethical causes aimed at defending and promoting sexual rights. Provided no one is harmed and that everything is legal, is there any reason why these revenues cannot be used for better ends?’

We never thought the mission statement of a porn website would have us wanting to cheer, but…dare we say it…Huzzah! This is some seriously well-crafted branding; the company manages to describe exactly what’s wrong with its own industry, and then explain with earnest precisely how it plans to overcome and redefine the meaning and purpose of that business. We are, despite ourselves, impressed.

What do you think, readers? Is this something you could get behind (no pun intended), or is this mission statement the equivalent of a phenomenal political speech given by another smooth-talking-but-no-different-from-the-rest candidate?

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

As bloggers covering the PR industry, we have to say we’re a little tired of hearing about campaigns characterizing companies and brands as “socially responsible” when we know they’re anything but. The public, however, remains receptive — so you’d better start working to paint all your clients in a “greener” light.

How do we know this? Because the CSR marketing specialists at Good Must Grow released a study. The primary conclusion drawn from interviews with more than 1000 Americans is that “purpose driven consumers” plan to spend an even greater share of their money on socially responsible companies and products in the years to come.

A full 30% of respondents said they want to spend more money on responsible companies’ products in 2013 than they did in 2012. Most importantly, the number of people who said “yes” to that question nearly doubled in a single year. Other numbers: 25% of respondents avoided buying products from companies they believed were not socially responsible — and considerable majorities called reducing consumption levels and contributing to like-minded nonprofits “important” actions.

The study provides some interesting PR guidelines — and the company’s website also features some PDFs with useful tips for brands looking to stand out in the increasingly crowded “green” space.