The Art of Cause Marketing

The Art of Cause Marketing:
How to Use Advertising to Change Personal Behavior and Public Policy
By Richard Earle
McGraw-Hill, 2000, 322 pp., ISBN 0-07-138702-1

Reviewed by Lynn Fenske

Public service announcements are the property of the non-profit sector. Is your organization capitalizing on their power? Are they included in your arsenal of public education, fundraising and volunteer recruitment tools? If not, you need to read this book.

Its author, Richard Earle, knows how to craft a powerful public service campaign. He created the Keep America Beautiful "Crying Indian" series for which he won an award. He kept Johnson & Johnson from the brink of ruin as creative director during the Tylenol tampering crisis. Thankfully he's made his vast knowledge and experience readily available in an easy to read, inspiring "hey, I can do that" guidebook.

Earle's writing is succinct. He explains how to pitch, plan and execute a cause related advertising campaign in just over 300 pages, complete with television storyboards, radio scripts and case studies to illustrate cause marketing in action. Earle also includes his top ten list of the best cause marketing campaigns and why (in his estimation) they worked.

I encourage you to study and learn from Earle's examples of some of the advertising industry's brightest and most creative efforts. Albeit American in content and context, the principles of targeting audiences, conducting research, writing advertising copy to suit different media, testing and measuring effectiveness are universal in application. Earle's assessment of the media includes the traditional (print, radio and television) as well as alternatives - direct mail, the Internet and public relations, or as Earle calls it, earned media.

In his conclusion, Earle makes a poignant observation. If advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on (as someone once remarked), then cause marketing is the most fun you can have with your brain on.

His final advice - go on! Make a difference!

 

This article originally appeared in The Sources HotLink, published by Sources and available online at www.hotlink.ca.


See also:
Eight Best Books for Publicity Seekers

 

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