The real question is "Which is going to be the first to commit 1% of its ad budget and NOT make a big fuss about it?"

Stefan Liute  

Make it a continouos one. And make the money go to slow and smart things, in the right hands with local long-term effect. Instead of just 100% immediate relief. See my comment on the main blog Conscious Citizens mentioned and the call to fundraisers there.  

Why doesn't Pepsi or Coke or Reebok or any of the big global or some of the local brands (like Maruti, the car maker in India) adopt a village to ensure that tsunami victims are put back on the road to recovery, in all domains including education, livelihood, etc. This is a tremendous branding opportunity and if they can get the mileage out of it, no harm done!  

Great idea Adite. The only time I worked in Thailand (mid 80s) my client developed a pop song that heroised pump-boys (oops I think that is what they called gas attendants). It went to the top of the charts and made Esso's (oops I know globally that's a non-u company but its local version was trying the nest it could to be human) grassroots employees feel proud. We need to heroise fishermen, unite people beyond nations around the oceans coastlines; if in the mid 70s Coke could commission the new seekers to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, why couldn't big blue engage the pop world's stars with a pop-song, an ocean-band-aid, and heroising the forgotten peoples of this world. I would have thought that the young generations would internet with that reality. Pepsi could even join in the 30000 action projects for ending poverty as long as it understood the open source joyful game millions of humanitarians already want to net-and-play.  

They imaged-over us to all human trust-flow was shredded; they couch potatoed us; they shrinks US; their mathematical errors in valuing intangibles exponentially compounded loss of all context-deep touch with goodwill and sustainability; they conditioned leaders who stealth taxed and claimed the most arrogant top-down faiths in the history of Scotland 1 2 if not of humanity - and now these inconvenient lies called global brands (those noisy ones, each adddicted to spending a billion dollars of customers money on ad budgets per year) are about to miss the greatest competitive advantages of 21st C marketing because they have neither read the first economic installments of death of distance in 1984 nor Friedman's 2004 view that collaboration is the new competitive advantage

http://collaborationgold.blogspot.com invites you to a whole new world of not just branding but leadership worth believing in -where communications interact the great joy of racing across treasure maps to places where the more people who stake for collaboration gold the more who win. If you don't believe this economics of abundance is possible in spite of the emergence of the www and 6 billion brilliant human beings ready and waiting to have access to every difference we can serve each other, then I would rather not see you on the map of collaboration gold until you have absorbed these 16 dvds from the world academy of social entrepreneurs.

After that if you have genuine questions on why the billion dollar image-making brand is going to be devalued faster than any junk bond in history - fine we will try and help you see the gold provided you love sustaining human beings

chris macrae wcbn007@easynet.co.uk