Art directors and designers who do work tend to get slammed a lot. Heck – God knows I’ve slammed a few right here in this blog. But today I came across a post that I felt just missed the mark a little. Paul Jones over at Cause Related Marketing writes about an ad for the United Nations World food Programme. The blog post is entitled “Keep Artsy Creative Directors Away from Your Cause-Related Marketing Campaigns“. So of course I am interested. Here is the ad that Paul writes about.
You can read Paul’s thoughts over at his blog but to nutshell them for you, he feels that the agency in charge of the creative for this ad completely missed the mark by using a black and white picture and a red cup.
“In every test of preferences (outside of the canyons of Manhattan), people say they want to see color images.
The only people that don’t prefer color are me and artsy-fartsy creative directors who can’t set aside their own creative biases long enough to think about what the intended audiences favor.
That isn’t the only problem with this ad from the May 19, 2008 issue of Time magazine.
The agency tried to make up for the lack of color in the photo by adding the red cup. But the red cup is a marketing conceit. The cups the WFP feeds people with aren’t red. Neither is the food the WFP distributes. The WFP doesn’t pass around a red cup when it’s fundraising. Donors don’t get a red cup as a premium when they make some kind of donation.
The red cup is, in the main, a way to introduce color into a campaign that should have had it from the start.
Of course, I would like to offer a alternative point of view.
This “artsy” visual quickly communicates that Drew Barrymore through her support is a part of helping feed children every day. The black and white/sepia image puts everyone on a even keel – we are all in this together… This type of design approach also will help separate this ad from the other 45 pages of full colour ads that would quickly get glanced over.
The red cup joins the two sides together – as well as draws your focus into the image and makes you look closely at the image. It also works well with the red headline and logo for the campaign. In fact, my only critique is that is alienates potential donors by not including them.
What do you think? Artsy Fartsy or Effective?