Ironically, USA Today never asks that question in its #America Wants Twitterathon to give away a free full page ad valued at approximately $190,000. Perhaps worse, USA Today never asked itself how the newspaper can use a full age ad to help a charity that authentically reflects the newspaper’s mission.
Instead we get another contest with no authenticity or theory of change. So what’s the impact? While it seems to be generating some tweets from charities, the overall impact will be debatable.
From a marketing standpoint, the contest — based on responses to date — has generated a lackluster amount of response. So whether it’s the USA Today or its Kindness Community, in general I’d say this could be better.
Now, from a change impact standpoint, we have a scattershot approach to the ad. No theory of change means whoever gets the ad will either be a great creator of ads or a bust, but USA Today doesn’t seem to care with this effort. Nor do they care what type of cause (health, environment, etc.) will win the effort. They’ve taken the Pepsi Refresh approach of trusting the crowd.
I’m not quite sure how that successfully changes anything.
Ironically, even the USA Today’s Kindness community has a purpose, “Kindness is your daily source of inspiration and guide to making a difference in fresh and exciting ways, no matter where you are. Each day, this site will unearth unique stories of giving with exclusive interviews, fresh takes on news stories, plenty of tips, and links to interesting resources.”
So let’s riff of that for a different campaign with a theory of change: “Blog your cause’s best story of kindness and tag it “USA Today America Wants” and we will dedicate an entire page in our newspaper to that story, a sidebar on on related tips, and an advertisement from the cause. We will work with you to create a strong call to action so your cause can measure the impact of the advertisement, whether it be donations, awareness or advocacy.
Hmm. Encourage stories of kindness throughout the Internet (achieve mission, reflecting authentic corporate values), create an opportunity for the cause to use the story to affect change (move the needle), generate earned media impressions (market), and add more members to the kindness community (market). Just my two cents on this…
#America Wants expires tomorrow (April 16). While I see cause marketing weaknesses in the effort, I certainly wouldn’t begrudge my cause friends for seeing differently or from participating. It’s still a full page ad ;) In fact, below find a couple of different views…
