It’s been a busy week for brand stories making the news. Here’s a few that caught our eye:
1. GoldieBlox:
We absolutely love the GoldieBlox video and the spirit behind the company, which is determined to disrupt the Pink Aisle and get girls interested in careers involving maths and science. That’s a subject near and dear to us. We’ve even created television shows trying to engage more girls in the maths and sciences.
It’s a great brand story. So we’re following with some interest the recent lawsuits around the use of the Beastie Boys 1987 song “Girls” which GoldieBlox turns on its head to get its girl empowerment message out.
The company is claiming Fair Use, essentially that the song is a parody. The Beastie Boys are claiming it is not Fair Use but instead an infringement of their copyright.
The matter may or may not be complicated by the fact that Adam “MCA” Yauch, the Beastie Boy member who died in May 2012, forbid in his will the use of Beastie Boy music in commercials.
Friends in advertising have asked why GoldieBlox didn’t get clearance. We suspect it’s because they knew it wouldn’t be forthcoming and were willing to take the chance and perhaps even the publicity wave that this suit will generate.
As for how it will play out, this one isn’t so straight forward. It is a parody and clearly promotes an idea beyond its own brand story. But it doesn’t promote a particular product. On the other hand, the video is a commercial intended to boost sales and there’s no doubt it has or will do that. Within a week, it has generated more than 7 million views and anecdotally, we’ve bumped into a number of people who have ordered from the site, inspired by the video.
We’ll be watching this one closely. But what do you think? Fair use or not?
2. Coca-Cola:
Coke caught our eye for a few reasons recently. They’ve just launched the new Coke website which is dedicated to telling its brand story through branded content instead of traditional marketing methods. The site features lots of brand story news combined with articles and features that might be appealing to Coke customers.
The launch comes just more than two years after Jonathan Mildenhall, VP of Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence at the Coca-Cola Company, outlined his vision for evolving Coke’s creative agenda from creative excellence to content excellence around its key brands.
The website also a platform for their stance on corporate social responsibility, particularly around sustainability. It has been criticized in the past around a number of environmental issues and the new site clearly and prominently tries to address the steps it is taking int his area.
Concurrently, Coke has undertaken a series of bold and sometimes quite beautiful campaigns promoting values it associates with some of the best moments in its history, like the “I’d like to Buy the World a Coke” campaign of the 70’s and the stand the company took in support of Martin Luther King and against segregation, pushing Atlanta where it was and is headquartered to ultimately take a more progressive stand on the issue.
One campaign lets people from one country give a coke to someone somewhere else in the world through special vending machines through which they can also share a personalized message. Another campaign similarly brings people together from warring countries by letting them share a coke, a dance and a few moments together through a projection wherein they can actually see each other and mirror each others action.
It is inspired brand storytelling.
The elephant in the room, of course, is obesity. In their opinions section, they feature a letter from a Coke executive, Rhona Applebaum, responding to a Baltimore Sun article which held sodas in large part responsible for the obesity epidemic sweeping North America.
Sugar is highly addictive and despite a brilliant marketing vision and its extremely courageous and inspiring execution, when Mildenhall spoke at Content World 2013, the most common response I heard was “brilliant strategy but is it really a good thing if we get more bottles of coke into the hands of more people?” And that’s the fundamental challenge of any brand trying to become more socially responsible when its product itself can be a source of harm.
On a final note, we think it’s commendable that Coca-Cola suspended its advertising in the Philippines, donating the money instead to relief efforts.
3. Make-a-Wish
Finally, we would feel almost remiss if we didn’t include the story about 5 year old Miles who, with a little help from Make-A-Wish, Batman and San Francisco, saved the city from doom.
We have helped realize wishes for a number of families and have always found it rewarding. Being as intimately knowledgeable on the subject of fundraising and storytelling around diseases, particularly children’s diseases, we would be remiss if we didn’t say, however, that we wish funding research were as sexy as helping a kid realize this kind of dream. Because truthfully, all of these families want healthy children more than they want a day of fantasy.
And that comes from making the disease manageable, curing it or preventing it from happening in the first place.
But all that said, we can’t help but sit back in awe of Make-A-Wish’s fun and gutsy move, setting up a narrative that invited an entire city to play along. They had tried this elsewhere with nowhere near the success they achieved in San Francisco, proving once again what an awesome city it is.
Thanks for saving it Miles.
Editors note: We included a link in the first line of this story to the movie trailer made about Mile’s adventures. But as of this writing, The San Francisco Chronicle, which had played such a key role in building and sustaining the story, has demanded the video be taken down because it’s in copyright violation.
So not a perfect brand story. But pretty darned close.