Here’s an idea…let’s change the “American Way of Life” for the better.
According to Wikipedia, the concept of clean coal is said to be a solution to climate change and global warming by coal industry groups, while environmental groups believe it is greenwash. Greenpeace is a major opponent of the concept because emissions and wastes are not avoided, but are transferred from one waste stream to another.
As for the ad itself, the argument is built on fear and that’s not what we need to move forward as a nation. Does fear motivate? Certainly, but it’s an unethical tactic. Why not tout the strengths of coal industry’s claims? Why not convince people with irrefutable facts? I’m inclined to believe the coal industry doesn’t have those facts. If they did their ad agency would have mined them.
In all seriousness, I’d love to see a candidate grow a pair and run a creative ad campaign. Leave the empty promises to the stump speeches. TV viewers don’t want vacant rhetoric. We want entertainment.
Palmetto Bluff is so Hollywood. A couple of years ago, Oscar attendees received free vacations at the exclusive May River resort. Now, the property is benefitting from free advertising care of the CBS daytime soap opera “The Young and the Restless.”
On the sopa, characters Nikki and Victoria Newman are busy developing fictitious “Clear Springs,” a community taking its cues from the very real Palmetto Bluff.
Palmetto Bluff gets this free publicity in exchange for providing the show with artwork to use as a prop, which is a pretty sweet deal considering product placement deals can run into the millions of dollars.
Tom Gardo, a spokesman for the Inn at Palmetto Bluff commenting on incremental business said, “It’s been great for us.”
Crescent Resources, a unit of Duke Energy, developed the property. The Inn at Palmetto Bluff is run by California-based Auberge Resorts.
The new Certified SC branding campaign was designed to stir-up state pride and loyalty, and change South Carolinians from consumers into advocates and customers who ask for and prefer Certified SC Grown products – driving the demand for the quality, diversity and availability of homegrown products and contributing to rural economic development for the state.
According to The State, the campaign is being paid for with a one-time $600,000 allocation from the state Legislature.
The effort comes at a time when consumers are growing savvier about the food they eat and demanding more information about where it comes from and how it’s grown. Recent bouts with contaminated spinach, peanut butter and pet food have placed the issue on the national and international stage.
[UPDATE] Here’s another post I made about the state’s economic development needs, which are plentiful. South Carolina’s unemployment rate was 5.8% in April, 2007—one of the worst in the nation.
Upon publication of Elmore Leonard’s 41st novel, Up in Honey’s Room, the author spoke with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Book Editor for The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.).
Speaking of his early ambitions and what the process of writing a script is like, Leonard says:
I wanted to write movies until I started to do it. Then I found out there was very little pleasure in it. There are all these people involved, changing your story all the time. Writing a book, I’m the only one I have to please. To write a movie you are taking in writing. You are given scenes that someone wants to see, some studio executive with no story sense. In 1993, I wrote my last screenplay, an original for director William Friedkin. It had to do with a lot of money that would be in a house in Miami Beach for one night before it was picked up and laundered. But some burglar, just looking for a TV, enters the house and takes the Igloo cooler full of cash.
Friedkin said he didn’t want any money laundering. And he didn’t want any references to drugs. I thought well, I’ll have to think of a new premise for this. I woke up at 5 a.m. at the Sunset Marquis and in five minutes I saw a televangelist raking in the money by healing a cute little girl of stuttering. When he gets home he and his girlfriend have all this money coming in. This is the money that goes into the Igloo cooler and is taken by this burglar. I wrote it, but it needs work.
Mr. Leonard, 81 years old, started out as an ad copywriter in Detroit in 1949. He didn’t give up his day job until 1961, at which point he figured he could make a living full-time as a writer.
Visit Leonard’s website to hear him read from his latest work.
The Hilton Head Chamber of Commerce paid California-based Believable Brands 60 Large for insights into the Hilton Head brand. That’s right, Hilton Head is more than a home to 30,000 beachcombers and a great place to visit for millions–it’s also a brand that needs promoting.
The Island Packet, a McClatchy newspaper, reveals the strategic communications guidelines established by Believable Brands.
The island “renews and enriches a visitor’s body and spirit through a sophisticated, relaxing and aesthetically beautiful and lush South Carolina seaside resort environment,” the brand statements say. And Bluffton is a “historic creative community located on the May River that is a tapestry of eclectic arts and eco-adventure.”
These insights were then delivered to Smith Advertising and Associates, a North Carolina firm that specializes in tourism marketing. Some of Smith’s creative is shown above.
According to Hilton Head Island MLS, the chamber receives about $1 million a year for tourism marketing from Hilton Head’s share of the state tax on overnight lodging. This year the chamber received an extra $450,000 for the brand study and the subsequent marketing campaign.
Sy Safransky is the founder and editor of The SUN magazine, an award-winning independent, nonprofit journal that has maintained itself and its readership for more than 28 years. It publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and interviews that live up to its motto, a statement by Viktor Frankl: “What it is to give light must endure burning.”
Darby loves The SUN . She’s always saying, “I can’t believe you don’t read The SUN .” For the record, I do pick it up from time to time. She loves the purity of the pub. Presumably so do the other 70,000 subscribers that help keep the Chapel Hill, NC operation afloat.
In a fund raising letter from Safransky, which I have before me, he discusses his battle to keep The SUN’s pages ad free.
As the planet staggers from catastrophe to catastrophe, do we really need yet another magazine filled with the kind of ads that romanticize the destruction of the natural world, deny moral complexity, and perpetuate the status quo?
He mentions in the letter that his methods may be quaint. That’s honest.
As a person who works in advertising, my reaction is why draw such deep lines in the sand? Selling ad space is not selling out and it’s not going to move the editorial direction of The SUN one iota.
I’m not saying The SUN should run ads, after all it is nice that such a magazine exists. I’m saying I would, faced with like circumstances. When brands sponsor great content, artists get paid. And everyone, especially artists, needs to get paid.
With my recent inclusion in Morph, “the Media Center conversation,” I’m asking myself if I am now part of the mainstream media. Better yet, part of the media elite.
With the inception of AdPulp, just 16 months ago, something shifted for me. My career took a strong turn towards writing, editing and publishing (and away from the brand-sponsored “writing” that had been the centerpeice). I feel like I’m in a better place now.
I still write copy and I still help big brands construct and implement their communications strategies. Perhaps, I always will. But I don’t enjoy doing it for strangers, nor for firms at odds with my fundemental beliefs.
I want to help companies working to improve the world in some way. Advertising is powerful stuff. So is media, in all its varieties. I want to apply advertising and media to powerful ideas–like solar, wind, biodiesel and hemp. All emerging industries that need my drive and experience (and yours!) to help move hundreds of millions of energy consumers to a post-oil economy.
I miss my youthful ambitions and idealism. It’s time to bring them back.
I recently had the opportunity to visit the Hilton Head Island area, also known as South Carolina’s Treasured Coast or Low Country. I flew in from Chicago to participate in a “working interview” with BFG Communications, a marketing services firm with spirits giant, Diageo, as an anchoring client.
BFG is located in Bluffton, SC just before the bridge to Hilton Head Island. This entire region is rich with history, and Bluffton is no exception.
According to Our Coast, Bluffton is “a state of mind,” as the town’s slogan goes, and has been since its inception. “It’s a community that really was started historically as a second-home community before the Civil War, where people would come in the summer to get away from the cities,” notes Roberts Vaux, a local attorney and entrepreneur. Because of the heat and bugs that accompanied the summer months, residents of the area saw Bluffton with its breezy bluffs as a perfect respite.
It’s also here, under what’s known as the Secession Oak, that the fires for the South to secede from the North got a little stoking. The tree may already have been two centuries old in 1844 when as many as 500 people met beneath its canopy. According to the Bluffton Historical Preservation Society, those people had come to hear their congressman, Robert Barnwell Rhett, “who had been so vociferously agitating since the 1820s for Secession.” And so began “The Bluffton Movement,” which led to South Carolina’s withdrawal from the Union on Dec. 20, 1860-the first state to secede. The oak is on the left-hand side of Verdier Cove Road at Highway 46, just outside the town limits on the Pritchardville side.
“Virginia Madsen’s character (Maya) has a radiant paean to wine: she leans forward in her chair, has a soft light on her face and proceeds to share her passion for wine, how it is expressive of the place from which it came, how the tastes move her, and how it changes over time in the glass and in the bottle. Honestly, any wine marketing budget for TV should just clip this soliloquy since it will intrigue and possibly convert the most stubborn of beer drinkers.” –Dr. Vino
My homeboy, Alexander Payne, has a new movie out. Sideways is his first feature that ventures beyond Omaha for a setting. About Schmidt takes place partly in Denver, while Election and Citizen Ruth are solidly set in eastern Nebraska. Place is still critical to Payne’s cinematic style, however. The place in this new film is wine country. The lead character, Miles (Paul Giamatti) is a wine snob and didactic talk about wine dominates several scenes in the film.
How guys relate to women is the other territory this film explores. And it ain’t pretty. One of the more riveting scenes in the film is when Stephanie (Sandra Oh) savagely beats Jack (Thomas Hayden Church) with her motorcycle helmet for his infidelity and lying, while Miles looks helplessly on.
