Creative Advertising Can Make a Point

Advertising is reviled in the non-profit world.

At least that is my experience. Non profit managers and volunteers suffer a mix of desire for the power of advertising and revulsion at its content.

Sadly, advertising is so often silly, playing upon gender or social stereotypes to promote products we don’t need. Perhaps most insidious is the cost; most charitable or social causes simply can’t afford to develop advertising campaigns, let alone pay for air time. Advertising is thus the purview of the wealthy charities, or the well connected who can negotiate pro bono services.

It is true that YouTube, Myspace and all the web-based creative outlets at least allow ANYONE to develop an advertisement. Sometimes these shorts are even powerful, provocative intelligent or educational. Most of the time, however, these clips are amateur, hand-held or web-cam productions featuring adolescent humor and banal subject matter. The vast majority of these clips don’t generate a sufficient market penetration to be useful (or even entertaining).

Then along comes http://www.computertan.com/. This is a really interesting way to use the internet to make a point about a change in behavior. It plays us.

You can view it yourself, but in short, this is an ad for a fictitious computer application that allows you to tan in front of your screen. The ad is polished, complete with the lovely (and provocative) female spokesperson. The genius behind this ad is the tease; the viewer is invited to go to the website to download the application for a free trial. If you do this, there is a fictitious screen calibration and eventually, “sunlamps” appear on your screen. After a few minutes, the sunlamps fade to white you are rewarded with a line of bold text that states: “DON’T BE FOOLED…UV EXPOSURE CAN KILL”

Up to this point, the viewer has no idea that this is a “message” campaign. But once you’ve gone this far, the message is made so clear. The follow up screens include graphic pictures and statistics on skin cancer followed by a simple three menu visual:

1. directs you to a website of the charity (Karen Clifford Skin Cancer Charity)
2. invites you to “hoax a friend”—adding an intelligent viral element to the campaign
3. allows you to make a comment—which harvests your email address by engaging you in your perspective.

Creative genius is a rare commodity. However, when creativity is married with the right message, advertising need not be viewed as the source of our problems, but possibly a responsible way forward.