We are going to talk about more than creative advertising on this blog (I promise), but this example is too interesting to pass up.
Colonel Sanders is fixing potholes. Via AdAge, KFC launched an innnovative program last week in which they are partnering with several cities around the U.S. to help patch those pesky obstacles that spring up this time of year.
Is the KFC campaign working? It looks like it has been a big success (even if you don’t drive in those cities). In addition to mainstream coverage by NPR and ABC News, the campaign has spread across the web in blog posts (here and here for example) and social media.
Here’s what I love about this program: it shows in a very tangible way that advertising $’s represent a huge resource. According to The Nielsen Company, companies spent $136.8 billion dollars last year in U.S. advertising. Big CPG players like P&G and Johnson & Johnson spent over $4 billion alone. That is a lot of potholes. What else could be done to transform some of those $’s into more tangible value? Here’s hoping we see lots more creative examples like this in 2009 and beyond.
The Colonel needs to learn to paint in the stencil, not on his foot!
@hoss, lol. He’d better not quit his day job.
Another example of transforming advertising dollars into tangible benefit is when schools partner with firms who build customized web portals and then they split advertising revenue 50/50 from those “school” portals.
These school portals need to deliver age-appropriate content of course and also be sensitive to the values of the school district: if the school district is on a health campaign then the portal can’t serve up ads for Jolt Cola, for example. In this context, the advertisements need to reflect the values of the community. It seems to me that when ad dollars start being used to create tangible benefits — fixing potholes, buying school books, etc. — there is a higher burden on those ads to align with the values of the community for whom they’re creating these benefits.
@Matt Great point. Without this alignment, you run the risk of your public institutions “selling out” in ways that aren’t directly benefiting the public good. I’m not suggesting that we ever want advertising budgets to be subsidizing public services on a massive scale. This example works much better on the margin.
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