Underground Ads (Advertising, Design & Strategy for Non-Profits

After much hard work, Underground is proud to announce the launch of the Believe Out Loud campaign website.

The new Believe Out Loud campaign aims to increase acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals in their respective religious communities. It’s not enough to believe that these individuals should be welcomed in their church communities—we must sing their welcoming as loudly as we sing the hymns. Because welcoming the LGBT community is itself a form of hymn—an expression of the ideals upon which our religious faith rests.

Believe Out Loud supports churches in becoming fully open to all - gays and lesbians included. It begins with a conversation, and the campaign website is a tool to help that conversation happen.

If you really believe in something, believe out loud.

Visit the website and join the movement:
http://www.believeoutloud.com

www.believeoutloud.com

UA client Just Detention International makes a great case study of how an organization can grow, while staying true to its roots. Founded by survivors of prisoner rape in 1980, JDI is the only organization in the U.S. working exclusively to end sexual abuse behind bars.

When they came to us in 2008, they still had the passion and dedication of their ex-prisoner founders, but were not being led by human rights attorneys. They had gone from being a grassroots activist organization to an international human rights watchdog. Our challenge was to update their identity in a way that allowed for new audiences and greater capacity, while maintaining their base of grassroots support.

A name change helped achieve this shift. Their old name, Stop Prisoner Rape, limited the audiences they could appeal to and locked them into the grassroots activist bracket. It captured the spirit, but not the potential, of their work.

Their current name positions them as authoritative experts, and is helping them direct more attention to their cause. Their contributions to a recent Department of Justice report on sexual abuse of inmates has won wide media coverage, including in publications such as the New York Review of Books and the Economist.

Read the full report here.

December 8th marked 29th anniversary of John Lennon’s death. As I walked to BART Tuesday night, I put on my headphones and listened to one of my favorite of his songs, God. Lennon goes through a list that covers all the bases, from religion to new age spirituality to rock and roll, and proclaims that he doesn’t believe in any of it.

Belief is big this time of year, and it creates something of a conundrum for non-believers. How do atheists address the challenge of holiday advertising? An article in the New York Times last week covered a campaign from the American Humanist Organization, which addresses the problem with kitschy holiday cheer:

One reader wrote a letter to the editor in response to the article, criticizing the ads for focusing on what sets humanists apart from religious folks. “One item of the humanist worldview,” the reader wrote, “is emphasizing the many positive positions we hold in common with a wide range of religious believers.”

In contrast to this reader, what I find most notable about the campaign is how it echoes the dominant Christmas advertising ethos in tone. It just doesn’t look that different from all the other holiday advertising I see at this time of year. I can see why the American Humanist Organization went with it; it can be strategic to tap into the momentum of a larger movement—in this case, Christmas advertising.

But it’s as if the humanists are feeling meek about atheism’s inherent edginess, and making up for it with a bland communication style. Somewhere in the creative brief for this campaign, there must have been the intention to counter Christian hegemony over the holiday season, but ultimately the ad just plays into it. Those smiling dodos in the Santa hats look like they can’t wait to hit the mall for some stocking stuffers. Is the ad trying to challenge the flock, or just join it? It’s not completely clear, but I suspect the latter.

If tapping into the predominant advertising approach isn’t the best way to stand out, what is? Can advertising be effective when it speaks to difference, rather than sameness? I think the Adidas “Runners, yeah we’re different” campaign is a great example of how it can be. Honest and funny, it isn’t shy about offending a few people, as long as it’s in service of the right message and reaching the right audience:

Good advertising is about spunk and character and a knowing wink. Like maybe a holiday ad targeting Jews that featured us eating mu-shu pork on Christmas. I don’t know what the secular humanist equivalent would be, but I do know that what the humanist ads are lacking is identity. They are wholly without culture and character, and they do not resonate. The humanism they proffer seems sterile and dry and…not very human.

Back to Lennon. I don’t think he would much like the humanist ads either. He might be saying “no” to a whole lot, but I don’t think it’s in the spirit of nihilism or atheism. His song plays as a paean to finding peace in one’s own reality, concluding, “I just believe in me. Yoko and me.” Whenever I get to that part of the song, it resonates so strongly that I get chills. And come to think of it, I feel the same way when I look at those Adidas runner ads. It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling that no Christmas jingle on the radio can replicate for me.

This holiday season, I hope we can all find inner peace and advertising that resonates.

Judith Warner had a great piece in the New York Times a few days ago, in which she managed to weave together an argument that featured both Michael Moore and the practice of female genital cutting. Worth reading, because she also put quite eloquently an idea that forms the basis of Underground’s own approach to communication:

…she had learned, through years of trial and error, that to reach people you had to meet them where they were. Respect them. Acknowledge their social norms, beliefs and practices. Find common ground. Build on shared human aspirations — for safety, for dignity, for a better life for one’s children — then discover how those shared aspirations might reasonably translate into ending practices that cause suffering.

If you come in and say, ‘You are awful people,’ people tune out and say, ‘Who do you think you are?’ …Making people feel bad about what they’re doing doesn’t work; they only get defensive. What does work is getting people to discuss together what are their rights and what they mean. It’s not just a question of blaming and shaming people but educating and empowering them.

For twenty years, Baykeeper has been on the front lines of the fight to protect the San Francisco Bay from pollution, as advocates and scientists, on the water and in the courts. Underground was proud to recently complete a new set of materials for the organization, including a report on its response to the Cosco Busan spill, the organization’s 2008 Annual Report, and now, it’s new agency brochure.

Baykeeper’s communications challenge today is making sure that that everyone who cares about the Bay understand both the very real threats to the health of the Bay and our ability (with Baykeeper’s help, of course) to fully protect and restore the Bay. To address that challenge, Underground decided to develop a concept for the brochure that heightened these contrasting views of the Bay as both remarkable and irreplaceable, habitable and vulnerable, swimmable and pollutable. The end result is a brochure that conveys both the beauty of the Bay we all love and the vital work that Baykeeper is doing to defend it.