submit to reddit



Stonyfield Farm CEO Gary Hirshberg and Coca-Cola’s Honest Tea CEO Seth Goldman are featured in rap videos launching a year-long education campaign to encourage consumers to eat and drink organic. The Stonyfield campaign, created in cooperation with other organic food makers, includes contests, and events.

The CEO videos are entertaining, but they also contain disturbing facts about the toxins in processed foods. Like so many campaigns, they drop the ball before the finish line by not including an initiative that can outlive the promotion.

The missing link in justdrinkorganic.com and yourorganicmoment.com — is that there is no indication anywhere on the sites that anything is being contributed to food pantries or programs to end hunger. For the campaigns to have real value, they’d need to tell people who are hungry in America how they plan to help eradicate, or at least contribute to ending, hunger in our nation

More than 49 percent of Americans live in “food insecure” households, according to the latest government statistics – which are from 2008. Things have gotten MUCH worse for Americans since then.

Stonyfield’s “Your Organic Moment” offers prizes to people who make videos explaining when they realized they should eat organic. It’s a classic “tell us why you love us” campaign. Times have changed, marketing needs to change too! Companies need to be part of the solution, and Stonyfield’s campaign – self-serving, but clearly well-meaning – is missing a big opportunity.

The campaign is being cross-promoted on Twitter and Facebook, in direct marketing, through events, and in stores. “We’re hoping that the great message (well-timed with Earth Month) and the fun nature of the video will encourage viewers to pass it along to their friends and networks,” Goldman told Marketing Daily.

Hunger: America’s hidden epidemic
According to The Oakland Institute “There is a hidden epidemic in the United States. All over this country it is striking Americans of every age group and ethnicity, whether they live in cities or rural areas. And so, despite the diversity of targets, those suffering in this silent epidemic have two things in common: they are poor or low-income, and they are increasingly going without enough food.”

Tyson – the anti-hunger champion
The grand champion company in the fight against hunger is Tyson Foods, whose Tyson Hunger Relief campaign is more than a decade old. In March, Tyson teamed up with the Food Research and Action Center to commission a nationwide survey on hunger as part of his company’s “KNOW Hunger” campaign.

By raising awareness about hunger in local communities, Tyson told the Times Record, it hopes to encourage more people to contribute food or cash to food pantries across the nation. That’s realistic, socially responsible marketing. It was the brand message before social media provided new tools to spread the theme, and it’ll be around when the tools change. Because Tyson, clearly, is in it for the long haul.