If 'Darfur' Sounds Familiar, Thank Heaven for Saint Advert

It bears mentioning Advertising Week's Panasonic Ideas for Life - Saving Darfur panel was as much about advertisers' power to set global agendas as it was about the actual plight of Darfur. Call it a conceit, but there's method to the madness.

Advertising played a pivotal role in raising awareness about genocide in Darfur. Some members of the panel expressed having been inspired into their current professions after seeing ads about famine or others' suffering.

Early on in the panel, a member of the Save Darfur Coalition referred to driving "mass education" about genocide via "mass advertising."

That sets the brain afire: do we want to take up the mantle of "educator"? If not or if so, what does that imply for ad firms that specialize in wrapping emotional experience around things?

Should we embrace social responsibility, or is this a slippery slope?

Policymaking is described as a supply and demand operation: there needs to be a demand, a citizen outcry, about injustices, in order to drive political change. Who better than advertisers to wield sentiment like a sword, eh?

A speaker described the marriage of marketing and movements thus: "One of the most important missing ingredients in the fight against genocide and famine and war in Africa is, strangely, marketing and advertising. Talk about strange bedfellows." Indeed.

And Advertising Week's Julie Thompson noted efforts like this "remind people of the good advertising and marketing can do; it's not just about Super Bowl ads, it's about moving people into action."

That's a warm, fuzzy takeaway.

Work for the Save Darfur Coalition was created by GMMB (an "issue agency"), which swelled the number of e-activists for the non-profit to over 1 million just last July.

David Mitchell of the Save Darfur Coalition shared some rules he discovered over the course of the campaign:

• People want to see evidence: dead bodies, masked raids, murders. Unfortunately, "Despots don't call in the photographers when they're about to execute mass numbers of people," says Mitchell.
• You can't make genocide ads that look like other ads about issues in Africa (like Save the Children ads, par exemple). People don't pay attention to them.
• People want to know who the bad guy is. That's not easy. Who do you blame? Investment houses? Omar al-Bashir? George-fucking-Bush?
• There are standards for taste and appropriateness: If you want something to appear in The New York Times, you can't throw in the dead bodies people want to see. There are also specifications for Pan-Arabic publications regarding issues like rape and murder.

Campaign foci:

• Prior to the campaign, most people didn't know what or where Darfur was. First-person accounts about rape, torture, murder, various horrors were used, and often read out loud by American suburbanites in the ad work, to make the issue more personal.
• Most muslims didn't know this was muslim on muslim violence. Had to demonstrate this in a culturally sensitive way.
• Darfur was compared to Palestine, Lebanon - this struck the agency as off-center, but research indicated it would drive the point home.
• Divestment efforts - the campaign waged war against Fidelity, which ended up selling over 90 percent of its petro China interests.

In one campaign, satellite imagery was used to "show people a place that was otherwise an abstraction." This effect was pretty awesome: "Google Earth" technology let users see "before attack" and "after attack" images of the grounds.

The session closed with words from Mira Sorvino, who made a few great points that rose like cream over a sea of emo.

The actress started working with Amnesty Int'l in March '04 as a Stop Violence Against Women Goodwill Ambassador. The use of rape as a tool of war in Sudan affected her a great deal.

As a kid, she had nightmares of being a Jew in the Holocaust (Sorvino is Christian) - she blames Anne Frank for the fixation.

One thing that stuck out for me: In her elaborate fit of passion, she described wondering whether she would have been a brave enough Jewess to suicide-bomb Hitler.

I could imagine her PR guy going, "Oh fuck."

But Sorvino's testimony shed light on an interesting point: advertising has power, not merely to encourage children to admire movie stars and beautiful women, but to appeal to their sense of sympathy - and indignation - on injustice and human sufferings.

This can make a huge impact on what they choose to do with their lives.

Sorvino points out that if we can inflame people, veritably intoxicate them with an idea or a notion, why not use it to save Darfur?

Advertising Week: An Awkward Prologue

After a 4:00 AM dash through the dark, followed by a five-hour bus ride, followed by an eight-block trek with a Streetwise Manhattan map, I've crossed the threshold of the Paley Center and made it to the Promised Land: Advertising Week 2007 in NYC.

Paley's squeak-shined glass windows have become giant YouTube stations. Beyond the lobby, thoughts about marketing by great men and civilians line the walls. The whole set-up fills my eyes with De Beers quality tears. (This may be less of an emotional reaction than exhaustion resulting from insomnia, and the fact that I haven't eaten.)

Apparently members of the press were only able to pick up their passes yesterday morning. This is disappointing. I call Blake the press pass guy. Blake is warm, pleasant and, in fact, female. "I'll bring you your pass around 1:00," she says.

Bummer. It's 10:00 AM, my first session's at 2:30, and I've still got a gigantic duffel bag with me. In a sea of suits I am the one jean jacket. And I'm sweaty and gross, and did I mention I've got a gigantic duffel bag with me?

I look, quite frankly, like an asshole. It's like a scene from Pretty Woman but 10 times worse.

An AdWeek director takes notice of me - possibly to throw me out - but goes the motions of asking who I'm with. I tell her the whole sad story, then I decide to head to my hotel until my press pass arrives.

"That doesn't make any sense," she says. And in a fit of unexpected kindness (or worship - or pity?) she adds, "Have a seat, I'll find you a workstation where you can set up and put down your belongings."

I take a seat beside one of the AdWeek volunteers, who has been charged with guarding the door and handing out programs. He's a happy-enough-looking dude. I turn to him, introduce myself and say, "So, you're volunteering for AdWeek?"

Hesitation. "I am here to ensure your every need is met," he says mechanically. His eyes dart around furtively. He presses the tips of his fingers together. "I'm new," he adds slowly.

"Um, awesome," I say. "So are you with AdWeek or are you doing this for school or...?"

"I've heard there are volunteer opportunities," he steamrolls loudly. "I don't know about unpaid ones. I don't know anything about that."

"Cool." I pause to work out where in fuck-all I went wrong. Are we even speaking English? "So what's it been like so far, are you enjoying--"

"Look." This is the first hard statement he's made since we shook hands. "If you're going to do a story on me, I'd appreciate if you tell me."

"I'm sorry...?" I'm appalled, genuinely hurt and confused, but he cannot admire his handiwork because he's already turned away. "Sir, I don't know what I did to make you feel like..."

He starts to whistle. He won't look at me.

We've reverted back to the sandbox. With that, I decide I'm going to do a story on him. This is that.

"Do you mind if I plug in my computer?" I say to no one in particular.

"I'll have to ask my manager," he says icily. The manager is a woman named Erin, who has been talking with the AdWeek director about where to station me.

"Sure, do what you want," Erin says, waving her hand in my direction.

I open my laptop and start screwing around on the 'net. The spazzed volunteer keeps looking for excuses to walk behind me and glance hard at what I'm doing while appearing nonchalant.

Later the AdWeek director returns and invites me into the Darfur session at noon.

"It really doesn't make sense for you to go back to your hotel and come here again anyway," she says with a warm smile. I love her. I would pledge my allegiance to her.

I ask her if she's sure, and she says everything will be fine.

Saving Darfur. SCORE!

That's how I currently find myself sitting in a large theatre below the camera guy (Richie; he likes photography), watching pictures of George Clooney and hungry-looking children dart by on a gigantic projector, at the very beginning of the Saving Darfur session.

I'll tell you how it goes.

Addressing One versus Many

For the cinematic adaptation of his novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote balked at the notion of Audrey playing Holly. He wanted Marilyn Monroe.

Paramount clearly had something else in mind.

Side-by-side, it's only fair to say the film is, at best, only loosely based on the Capote book. Capote's Golightly is completely different from the one we encounter on the big screen - similarly frothy, granted, but by no means was she planning to forsake her own ideas to go running into Paul's arms in the rain.

In the book, she doesn't even go back for the cat she deserted.

Nonetheless, the book and the movie gleaned acclaim in their own circles, and even drew audiences to one another - the book to the film, the film to the book.

Capote was a writer appealing to the individual. He knew what he was doing. An individual has opinions. For him or her, Holly is less a woman than an allegory. On print, her betrayals make sense.

Paramount baked visual and auditory hits for hundreds at a time. They knew what they were doing. In a theatre, individual opinion is largely dependent on the sentiment of others. And Holly isn't just an empty vessel open to interpretation - she's living, breathing skin, a woman with a fashion sense and a personality that reminds people of themselves or their aunts or their mothers.

Decades after Audrey Hepburn's star hit its peak, women are still fashioning themselves after the charmed Holly Golightly. The "little black dress" is standard issue for any self-respecting New York female.

It would be unreasonable, I think, to call one more or less authentic than the other.

With Breakfast at Tiffany's in mind, consider a marketer's attempt to shove a TV ad campaign onto YouTube or some kind of microsite.

These efforts largely fail. Unless an ad is particularly conversation-worthy, what in hell makes you think people are trawling YouTube for it? They're too busy spoofing Miss South Carolina and gawking at the miracle that is Sonic Speed Run. (Seriously, how does he do that? I could never get past Chemical Plant Zone 2.)

You cannot separate the medium from the message. A person is not a passive receptor for any piece of data we choose to spoon-feed it. When I watch television, I have completely different expectations, and a completely different mindset, from when I am sitting in front of my computer.

Paramount understood there's a difference between the individual experience and the group encounter. Paramount also knew it had a limited amount of time to turn a flighty hooker into a social icon. The individual can be forgiving; the group, less so.

These are things that architects of the individual experience alone don't always understand. That's why Capote was so good at addressing the one, while Paramount turned addressing the crowd into a multi-million-dollar business.

The challenge lies in that, these days, a marketer must try to accomplish both: addressing one, touching many.

The Confidence Game

While promise has legs, only talent has hands.

- Paco de Lucia

In February or March I was standing around in the break room at my old job, burning a hole in a big tin cookie jar, when Deanna, one of the co-creative directors, walked in.

"Hi, Angela. Is everything okay?" she said.

Deanna is nice and I have always liked her. But I didn't really want to go into specifics about why I was standing in the break room eating butter cookie after butter cookie while scowling at the Formica, so I said something along the lines of, "Deanna, I'm really sensitive."

She stared for awhile as though trying to work me out. Then,

"Is this personal or work-related?"

"Work." I can't remember what was irking me so much. It could have been any number of things: a recent fight with the COO, an angry client, an unreasonable (or all too reasonable) blog comment...

Deanna tilted her head and kept staring. It's possible that I stopped eating cookies at this point. It's hard to say.

"You know," she began slowly, "it's hard to be young and have a lot of responsibilities at work."

"Uh huh," I said. This was somewhat flattering and I was already starting to cheer up. God, I'm such a sucker.

"But," she continued, just as slowly, "you get to a point."

"What kind of a point?"

"You get to a point where it doesn't matter what other people say and what other people think of you, because you know what you can do, and you're confident in your skill."

"When did you get there?" I said, pressing insufferably even though I could feel us veering into Wonder Years territory.

Deanna smiled in a manner most motherly. "I think I was in my 30s," she said.

That seemed like a very long wait.

She started walking off. "If you want to talk about it more, come by my desk," she added. She stopped to hug me, then left me alone with the cookies and the godforsaken coffee, which was burning in its gurgly machine.

I have thought about that conversation a lot since then. Reading Chuck Klosterman's IV added to the discourse inside my head. There's a kind of arrogance you possess when you're young and bright. The arrogance isn't quite made up of confidence; it's made more of a desperate desire to prove to everybody you meet that you're somebody.

It's another telltale sign that you haven't yet become confident in your skill.

How do you break out of that? How do you get confident in your hands and your head? How do you stop sucking on every word the critics and the flatterers say?

Do you have to wait for it, like puberty?

One Monkey to Berate Us All [video]

Dance, monkeys, dance!

Facebook and MySpace: Batting for Two Different Teams?

When Facebook opened its back-end to outside applications in early spring, it gave users the power to act on preferences for how they'd like to interact with others.

Suddenly, you didn't have to wait until Facebook felt like offering you a functionality; you could just code one up yourself and disseminate it.

MySpace also gives users a freedom they don't have on that other site: they can "pimp out" their profiles. Some, like Tim Gunn's Guide to Style, don't even look like MySpace pages. For this reason, MySpace can be thought of as a personal Web publishing tool for those advertising either themselves or a product. Many do both.

Spacelift, a new Facebook app, suggests there's a bigger difference between MySpace and Facebook.

Spacelift enables users to import their MySpace profiles onto Facebook so they don't have to deal with the MySpace interface. (Check out before and after shots of a transitioning profile on Mashable.)

What once may have been written off as a "lifestyle preference" -- your love of a pink background versus a green one, and that MySpace lets you exercise that preference while Facebook does not -- may betray the reason why Facebook is increasingly the preferred site for social networking.

MarketingVox notes Spacelift could inspire "[others] that move regularly between MySpace and Facebook [...] to leave one in complete favor of the other."

That's a scary statement. The question is, why would users on the fence actually leave MySpace for Facebook? Don't they want access to a profile page that lets them be as individual as possible?

For one, the sheer simplicity of Facebook's design probably works in its favor. While MySpace may still boast the largest number of users, last April Facebook grew 106 percent to MySpace's 70 percent.

And in the UK, Facebook has already overtaken MySpace in terms of Internet searches.

The advent of Spacelift, however, suggests to me that maybe we've been comparing apples to oranges all this time. The users leaving MySpace for Facebook are probably not the same ones that significantly manipulate their MySpace pages, then use those pages to generate sales or draw attention.

Because that's another difference: you can't look at a Facebook profile unless you're part of a user's network, or already friends with that user. It's a walled garden. MySpace, on the other hand, gives you the option to make your profile visible to non-MySpace users.

Facebook's decision to keep a tight grip on its form, while letting users experiment with its functions, is a formula that forces users to focus less on the appearance of their profile pages and think more about collaborative opportunities.

If you're a social networking site, that's what you want: for users to interact with one another on your platform. This keeps them coming back.

That MySpace users spend less time networking than self-promoting may mean it's less a social networking site than a personal publishing tool. And if that's the case, this puts it in a completely different competitive realm.

Maybe in the future we'll be holding MySpace up to blog/community hybrid sites like Xanga or LiveJournal.

Originally published on CMSWire.com.