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?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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?

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The film, created by Publicis Kaplan Thaler, explores what such a world might look like as John Lennon‘s famous solo hit, “Imagine,” plays in the background. According to the agency, the families of all of the individuals featured in the video generously gave their support for the film. Yoko Ono took a break from designing ridiculous menswear to secure the rights for Lennon’s song to be used.

The ADL hopes this video will prompt people to “Join us by watching, sharing and taking steps every day to create a world without hate.” The statement on their website is simple, powerful and reminiscent of Lennon’s famous lyrics: “Imagine a World Without Hate™. We do. Join us.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Move over, Farmville. Virtual farming is out, and virtual plumbing (for a good cause) is on its way in.

As part of its annual Tap Project, UNICEF has partnered with Droga5 to create an app that turns your Facebook page into a virtual water tap. The project’s goal is to help raise awareness of the staggering number of people around the world who lack access to safe drinking water (roughly 800 million), while simultaneously raising money to help get clean water to those people.

According to UNICEF, just $5 dollars can give one child safe drinking water for 200 days. By donating those $5 dollars to the cause via PayPal or text message, Facebook users can now turn their pages into virtual taps carrying water to those in need (money-raising) and then choose two friends to whom they can link “pipes”, urging them create taps of their own (spreading awareness). Through this dual-action campaign, UNICEF hopes to “turn the world’s largest social network into the world’s largest water network.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Now, champion of all things green and climate-related Al Gore is hoping to elicit the same can’t-look-away public reaction when it comes to not-so-pretty facts about global warming. Gore’s Climate Reality Project has hired Arnold Worldwide, one of the agencies behind “Truth,” to raise awareness about the dangers of climate change and challenge the “fake science” and half-truths being circulated.

Arnold has answered the call to action by creating a website/social media tool called “Reality Drop,” which finds climate news from all over the Web and compares it with the most relevant science. Articles displayed in red are said to contain myths and denier-science, while those displayed in green contain evidence that climate change is an undeniable scientific fact. Visitors to the site are encouraged to share the green articles on Facebook and Twitter, and also to “drop some reality” on the red articles by posting comments containing copy-and-pasted scientific facts provided on the Reality Drop website.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The new Girl Scout cookie app, unveiled last week, is available for both Apple iOS and Google Android smartphones. Not only does it introduce users to all 16 types of cookies, but this sweet little app helps tagalong junkies find the nearest cookie booth at which they can slake their chocolate/peanut butter lust. Savvy Scouts already used social media to break all sales records in 2012; we have a feeling this app will boost their numbers to even greater heights.

It’s not all about the cookies, though; lest your sugar coma cause you to forget that Girl Scouts aren’t just peddlers of crave-able baked goods in colorful boxes, the organization also hopes to use this app to spread awareness of the youth group’s larger mission.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The world’s largest animal rights group is no stranger to controversial advertising. In fact, it could be argued that most of its past campaign themes–from models wearing nothing but strategically-placed lettuce leaves to ads likening the slaughter of chickens to the Holocaust–were developed with shock value in mind.

Now, PETA is claiming that ABC declined to air its latest spot during the upcoming Oscars telecast because it’s too “political and controversial.” The commercial features Phoenix submerged in water, as his voice-over draws parallels between the pain and fear associated with drowning and the ordeal of fish doomed to suffocate in the air after being caught. We’re willing to bet PETA didn’t actually expect ABC to run its ad, and was counting on the “too controversial” label to garner the attention the group is so good at earning. I mean, we took the bait, didn’t we? (No pun intended).

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The spot, which features such familiar names and faces as Jon Hamm, Beyoncé, Chris Rock and many others, made it to number 6 on the Ad Age Viral Video Chart this week. Like all of the campaign’s content, the video’s simple, straight-forward, no-frills style serves to promote its overall message: less rhetoric, more action.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The three main objectives of the Demand a Plan campaign are:

1. Require a criminal background check for every gun sold in America
2. Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines
3. Make gun trafficking a federal crime, including real penalties for “straw purchasers”

Like most modern advocacy campaigns, this one gets creative with social media:

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.