LoudSauce: Crowdfunded Advertising for Causes

What bus shelters have to do with civic engagement and Marshall McLuhan.

The key folly of cause marketing can be reduced to low awareness and an unconvincing voice — weak, creatively uncompelling messaging that fails to reach a sufficient number of people and fails to engage those it does reach. Or, to frame it in Marshall McLuhan‘s famous medium/message paradigm, an insufficient medium carrying a toothless message. We’ve previously looked at how UK nonprofit DoTheGreenThing is solving the creative merit problem by borrowing talent from the traditional ad industry to reshape the message. Now, startup LoudSauce is borrowing, quite literally, media space from the traditional media industry to reshape the medium.

Dubbed the world’s first crowdfunded media buying platform, it does for causes what Kickstarter and other platforms do for creative projects, allowing fans and supporters to microfund media space for the causes they’d like to support who couldn’t afford it on their own. Part civic activism, part socialist capitalism, LoudSauce aims to give ideas that matter the share of voice they deserve, help bring smart projects to life and, ultimately, create a new market for conscious creative ad content.

Our vision is to transform the medium of advertising from one that primarily drives consumption to one of civic participation. What if we had more power to shape which messages were promoted on our streets? What if our billboards inspired us toward a future we actually wanted?” ~ LoudSauce

LoudSauce already helped Green Patriot Posters raise $3,200 to get beautifully designed sustainability PSA posters onto San Francisco’s bus shelters. This week, they’re helping Brain Pickings favorite The Story of Stuff microfund a teaser to reach 2 million people during A&E’s show about hyperconsumption, Hoarders.

If you have or know of a cause or pro-social message that needs to reach more eyeballs and eardrums, LoudSauce would like to hear from you. Meanwhile, browse the current campaigns to microfund and keep an eye on the site as it continues to grow — we think it’s a winner, and that’s our two-cent microcontribution.

Our only hang-up with LoudSauce is that, for a project that aims to up the ante on creative engagement in marketing communication, it suffers from tragically low production value and creative merit on its meta-communication, from the site design to the videos promoting the campaigns being microfunded. We wish they’d do a LoudSauce campaign for LoudSauce itself, getting funding to hire a good designer and a good microdocumentary filmmaker. We’d certainly contribute.

via TBD

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Catch of the Day

Preservation the surfer way, or why farmers’ markets are now selling condoms.

We’re suckers for clever guerrilla campaigns. We’re also suckers for sustainability. So, naturally, we’re all over this campaign for environmental nonprofit Surfrider Foundation.

From condom “fillets” to styrofoam “bites” packaged like something you’d find at Whole Foods, the Catch of the Day campaign is a visceral reminder of how pollution both stifles wildlife and ultimately ends up on our plates.

The junk is all 100% authentic, hand-picked from various beaches across America, from Galveston to South Padre Island to Venice Beach.

Yep, the condoms too.

The campaign positions littering as the antithesis of the true surfer spirit of bonding with nature, respecting it, and appreciating its raw beauty. Because nothing puts as big a damper on that appreciation as having a cigarette bud stick between your toes while walking on a wild beach.

Best part: Packaged in (we hope post-consumer) plastic to look like seafood, the stuff is offered at real farmers’ markets across the coasts. Talk about authenticity and stride-stopping impact. Genius.

Out of Saatchi & Saatchi, LA.

via TreeHugger (Thanks, Teddy)

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Deadliest Itch: Malaria Awareness Mosquito-Mosaic Posters

Why the seat of privilege comes down to having OFF! on hand.

The other day, we established that we’re all African. Fitting, since today we’re looking at one of the coolest awareness campaigns we’ve seen in a long while, which happens to address Africa’s most serious malady: Mosquitoes.

And if you think we’re kidding, or making an awful joke that belittles the AIDS epidemic or genocide, we’re not — every year, mosquito-carried malaria takes more children’s lives in Africa than all other diseases combined. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 3,000 children die from malaria every day.

So African nonprofit África Directo unleashed a brilliant campaign to make this simple point so powerfully:

“Nothing and no one takes more lives than malaria”

The portraits are, of course, composed entirely of mosquitoes — a stencil technique that puts Banksy to shame.

Out of Spainish agency Sra. Rushmore.

via Arab Aquarius

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