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

Not to toot our own horn, but…

The rest of the world will find out in April when HOW Magazine publishes its 11th Annual Interactive Design Award edition, but YOU, dear Underground Blog Reader, get the low down skivvy on the inside tip:

WE WON! WE WON! WE WON!

(Not that we care about that kind of thing.)

But we are rather proud that StopSoot.Org - the video, website and ad campaign we created for EarthJustice - was selected out of over 700 entries to receive one of handful of merit awards.

Congrats to everyone who worked on the project and EarthJustice for a super successful campaign.

You can see big winner here:
www.stopsoot.org

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.

We humans are a narrative-driven species. We tell stories as a way of making sense of the vast chaos unfolding around us. Stories are particularly prevalent is in political advertising—a field that Underground knows a thing or two about.

Yesterday, Heath showed the office a compelling presentation he created called “Telling American Stories.” It’s a tool to help progressives improve their communication on issues they care about, and it demonstrates the ways that we can use stories to our advantage—to captivate an audience, to highlight shared values, and forge a sense of community.

I left the presentation wondering about the relationship between stories and truth. As a communications firm, I think we know more than anyone that we’re not looking for the truest story, but for the most effective one. All stories, by their very nature, are riffs on reality, not reality itself. Stories are subjective—they can’t be true.

The untruth of stories doesn’t make them immoral or wrong; quite the opposite. When we’re using them to further a cause that we care about, they can be powerful tools to do good, despite their un-truth.

For example. This video uses a story to convince people that it’s important to take care of the environment. It says: for the panda to be happy, the tree must be happy, and for the tree to be happy, the sky must be happy—we’re all connected.

But is it a true story?

Consider: The trees don’t care about the polar bears, the sky doesn’t care about the trees, and nature is utterly indifferent to all. Humans care about all these things selfishly, because they ensure our survival, and that’s why we’re the only ones out there making videos about it.

This second story about human self-interest strikes me as a little closer to reality than the panda video, but it probably wouldn’t be as strong a motivator for taking care of the environment.

The stories we’re telling may not be true, but that’s no reason to stop telling them.