Yes, that cool Iggy Pop Amnesty campaign was unauthorized

It happens all the time. And the creatives may have meant well. But just because you have a clever idea for a celebrity endorsement, and access to Photoshop, doesn't mean you can use their images without permission! No matter what the cause.

Last week, I wrote about this campaign on Osocio. With the tagline, "Torture a man and he'll say anything," witth Iggy Pop confessing, “Justin Bieber is the future of Rock and Roll,” The Dalai Lama declaring that “A man who doesn’t own a Rolex by age 50 has wasted his life” and Karl Lagerfeld stating “A Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops are the height of elegance.”

Clever, yes. But suspicious. While Iggy happily shills for PETA, The Dalai Lama seemed like a stretch. Conclusion: "What I’d really like to know is if the celebrities had any say in the use of their images."

Well, guess what? Pitchfork reports that Iggy and His Holiness, at least, had no say in the use of their images.

From Amnesty:

To generate awareness about our campaign against torture, Amnesty International Belgium French speaking section used an image of Iggy Pop without his authorization.
Even though we acted in good faith, we would like to apologise to Iggy Pop for having done so. 

The overall goal of this campaign is to try to influence people’s ideas on the use of torture. According to surveys, a shocking number of people believe that “torture may sometimes be useful” ; more than 36% of people even think that torture is justified in some cases. This is unacceptable, and we illustrate this reality with the message that a man who is tortured will say anything in order to escape this awfulness, using provocative images and statements to attract public attention. We would therefore also like to make it clear that the statement attributed to Iggy Pop that he believes Justin Bieber is the future of rock and roll does not represent Iggy Pop’s personal opinion but was part of the creative process for this campaign and was intended to be ironic.

For the launch of our latest campaign against torture, the image of His Holiness the Dalai Lama was used by our section (Belgium french speaking) and was widely shared on the internet. Although the Dalai Lama was not the target of the campaign, we understand that this image has caused particular concern in some quarters. We have therefore chosen to remove this picture from our digital material in order not to cause any further upset and ensure people’s attention remains focused on the real aim of this campaign : to stop torture. 

We apologise for any upset caused by this image.

Using celebrities without permission is common practice worldwide, especially in countries that don't have strong legal ties with the celebrities' countries of residence. But to hijack an image — one that, for better or worse, is the celebrity's brand — for an organization of such high prominence, for an important cause, and in an EU country, is idiocy.

Don't worry, Amnesty. I blame your agency. Who was that, anyway?

How Pussy Riot became the cause of 2012

Back in January, I blogged on Osocio about a Russian punk band called "Pussy Riot" that made headlines for its guerrilla gigs against Vladimir Putin.

Here they were in Red Square with "Putin Pissed":



At the time, they seemed like another expression of post-Soviet feminine frustration with the continued male dominance of — and corruption in — politics. Like Femen, but with balaclavas instead of bare breasts.

Also in common with their Ukranian sisters-in-protest, they continued to push boundaries. After a a guerrilla performance in Moscow's main cathedral, in which they sang to the Virgin Mary to protect Russia against Vladimir Putin, Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich were arrested for "Hooliganism" and "Inciting Religious Hatred". In August, they were sentenced to two years' hard labour. (Two other band members fled Russia.)

And then the whole world took notice.

Amnesty International  proclaimed the group Prisoners of Conscience, and set their global membership to work demanding their release. Paul McCartney, Sting and Madonna joined the cause. (Well, they did sort of ask for her help.) Alicia Silverstone demanded they have access to vegan meals. Peaches held a concert for them in Canada.

Not to be outdone, Femen sent prominent member Inna Shevchenko out to chainsaw down a wooden memorial cross in Kiev... topless, of course. (She had to flee to France afterwards, to avoid arrest and/or angry religious mobs.)

Free riot from FEMEN Video on Vimeo.

With all this attention, mainstream reporters and news editors suddenly found themselves writing "Pussy" over and over again, sometimes with amusing results.

Pussy Riot even made a conceptual appearance at New York Fashion Week (see photo at top), their colourful balaclavas co-opted in the Gerlan Jeans runway show. Quite the strange journey for a anarcho-feminist collective.

There are many people in the world who suffer for free speech. Why are Pussy Riot the ones everyone got behind?

Never underestimate the power of branding. The name gets your attention, especially in a year in which frank discussion of women's sexual parts has become mainstream political conversation. "Free Pussy Riot" is one hell of a slogan, and lends itself easily to memes.

And then there are those balaclavas. 

They're anonymous and frightening, combined with the hardcore music, but also use warm colours and soft fabrics. It's a look easily copied by supporters, and make a memorable symbol of protest.

And the music. Fast, guitar-driven punk with one political barb after another. The band kept releasing new material, even with three in prison:



Sex, balaclavas and rock 'n' roll... it's a powerful combination for a fringe movement in need of popular support. And it's working.

Just last week, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called for the three members of the punk band Pussy Riot to be freed, saying "In my view, a suspended sentence would be sufficient, taking into account the time they have already spent in custody." They have an appeal scheduled for October first.

Branding your message matters. Always.

Remember when Canada was horribly racist?

Via Buzzfeed

This poster promoting the Canadian Patriotic Fund, a World War One fundraising effort to help support wives and dependents of Canadian soldiers, is pretty damn offensive by today's standards.

But, almost a century later, we still have a long way to go:

Violations of the basic human rights of Canada's Aboriginal people is still a "Priority Concern" for Amnesty International, and you don't have to look far to see examples of how our country's first populations are still treated like second class citizens.

Sad.

F'd Ad Fridays: Amnesty International tries a classic Bugs Bunny trick

Via IBiA

In this case, let's hope it works.

Amnesty goes on tour with Swedish death metal band

According to PRWeek, Amnesty International has partnered with Swedish band Arch Enemy (above) to promote the cause of freedom of expression throughout their Khaos Over Europe tour.

Via PRWeek

From the release:

Head of art for Amnesty Jo Metcalf explained that partnerships with acts that have strong relationships with fans are a growing focus for the charity. 

‘Working with bands who have loyal supporters who listen when they say something is far more beneficial than talking to them in a general way,’ said Metcalf. ‘When Arch Enemy say something about freedom of expression it has a resonance with fans. That goes for bands from Arch Enemy to U2.’

That's a fairly wide range, wouldn't you say? But a great outreach for Amnesty.



Thanks to Jenn F. for sharing.

F'd Ad Fridays: Get your free dissident Chinese artist here!

Seriously, though, you can join Amnesty's campaign in support of Ai Weiwei here.

Thanks to Sleeveface's Carl Morris for sharing.

#worldwaterday

Half a litre of clean water. I just got it from the fountain. I drink a few of these every day without even thinking about it.

But today, I'm thinking about it. It's World Water Day.

Last year, at this time, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the world that more people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war:

“These deaths are an affront to our common humanity, and undermine the efforts of many countries to achieve their development potential.”  

This year, the theme is focussed on urban challenges, which could not be more timely. Not only do the Third World's urban poor often lack access to drinkable water, but right now Japan is in a water crisis due first to the earthquake and tsunami, and now to radioactive contamination.

Other countries are rushing in to hydrate the Japanese, but the global nature of the water disaster is not as easy to quench.

But what can we do about it? For one thing, we can support international development efforts to improve water infrastructure. WaterAid, for example, works on an individual and family level to help vulnerable people access their own water. You can also make consumer choices that support your local water resources, by drinking tap water instead of bottled.

Politically, you can make yourself more aware of the dangers of water privatization. On July 28, 2010, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly agreed to a resolution declaring the human right to “safe and clean drinking water and sanitation.” Canada abstained.

Why? According to The Council of Canadians, the Canadian government had potential revenue to lose:

"The world’s water companies would like to see water regarded as a human need, enabling them to control and sell water to the highest bidder for profit. Because Canada manages the largest freshwater resources in the world, companies are lining up to pump, bottle and privatize our water for their profit. Despite the increasing threat to our water, the Canadian government has not updated its national water policy in over 15 years. Instead, governments over this period of time have continued to support free trade agreements that only further threaten our ability to safeguard our water for people and nature."

There are other issues too. When it comes to drinking water, Canada has some dirty little secrets. Our federal government is mandated to assist First Nations in ensuring safe drinking water in their communities. But there are some who fall off the radar.

A particularly egregious example is the plight of the Lubicon Cree. We have come to know more about this issue than the average Canadians through our work with Amnesty International.

"The Lubicon Cree live in the middle of the Alberta oil fields. Vast wealth has been taken from their land. In fact, the province’s share of this oil and gas wealth has been estimated to exceed $14 billion. Yet the Lubicon people live in conditions that would be unimaginable to most Canadians.
The Lubicon community of Little Buffalo has no running water and no sanitation system. Before the Alberta government permitted large-scale oil and gas development on their land, the Lubicon took their drinking water from the muskeg and the lakes and streams. They can no longer safely do so.
With ever more intensive forms of oil and gas development, including the beginning of oil sands extraction, there are increasing worries that even water deep below the ground may become unusable."

But I'll let the Lubicon youth tell you in their own words:



So while World Water Day focusses on cities, my thoughts are with a threatened people in my own country. Because when anyone, anywhere, is denied the right to safe water, everyone's human rights are at risk.

Cheers.

Just be shareworthy, and the world's attention is yours

Osocio has just announced the finalists for its Campaign of The Year award.

In the announcement, editor Marc van Gurp writes:

"The 20 nominees this year show us a remarkable evolution in social advertising. When I started blogging about this niche industry in 2005, most of the campaigns where print-only. The majority of the campaigns in 2010 are driven by online video. Digital and real-world interactivity, and social media, are growing fast. My prediction for 2011 is that these two will be the leading campaign instruments."

I wholeheartedly agree. If you look at the campaigns that really capture public attention these days, most of them are about making you part of the story. And it can happen in the real world, the digital world, and between both.

For example, just today on Osocio I covered the most recent phase of an Israeli campaign by Woman to Go. The first part was a real-life installment in the shop window of an upscale mall in Tel Aviv. Real live women, who appeared to be scared and abused foreigners, were offered for sale like products or pets.

Clients are constantly looking for broad coverage, and trying to buy it through traditional media. Instead, Woman to Go created newsworthy real-world content in a single location, and ended up being talked about globally.

In the latest installment of Woman to Go, they posted an online video of an anonymous man actually buying a woman from the storefront, and encouraged people to interact online by pressing a "dislike" button on the YouTube page.

It's a very simple formula, and one which combines the very oldest form of advertising — live performance — with the newest media channels. You see it in the (now tiresome) trend of flashmobs that are recorded and put online. Or when an actor brings the commercial to a bunch of unsuspecting victims. Or even when an advertiser pulls some really weird shit like this:



The important thing is that what used to be called a "publicity stunt" now often becomes viral content. And if you're only trying to raise awareness for a cause people can really care about, their automatic interest makes it all the easier to get out there.

Even traditional media can work this way, when you start thinking about focussed impact rather than direct reach.

This interactive bus shelter for Amnesty International Germany could actually track the eye movements of a person sitting inside, presenting the violent domestic abuse scenario only in the peripheral vision.

Could they afford to do this more than once? Did it function perfectly? Did it get vandalized?

Who cares? It got the message out, and made headlines around the world. And that happened because it was novel technology, and used a strong concept to draw attention to an important issue. If you document it and seed it correctly, it only really needs to work once.

So as I face yet another year of trying to help clients with shrinking ad budgets and great expectations for "social media", I hope I'll be able to do something different. Something shareworthy.

You gotta write... for your rights...

Today is United Nations Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

To celebrate this day, Amnesty International invites activists worldwide to Write For Rights, and send letters to urge governments everywhere to stand by their commitment to uphold all of the rights enshrined in the Declaration.

Here in Canada, there are public writeathon events happening from coast to coast (to coast).

The action is fairly straightforward. Just visit amnesty.ca/writeathon to educate yourself about some of the violations of the Declaration happening around the world (including right here in Canada!), register online, and start writing.

You won't be alone. Canadian celebrities such as Margaret Atwood, Eric Peterson, Sarah Harmer, David Usher and Broken Social Scene are also taking part.



Write to demand freedom for Prisoners of Conscience. Write to demand equal rights for indigenous people. Write for women. Write for life.

Just write for what's right!

Blog Action Day 2010: Water, water, everywhere?

Change.org|Start Petition

It's raining today in Ottawa. It's a reminder of how lucky we are here in Canada, where lakes are said to outnumber people and where up to 20% of the world's fresh water reserves remain.

Today, bloggers all over the world are speaking out about access to fresh water for Blog Action Day 2010.

You'll see stories about all the things we need to do to guarantee fresh water to people in the third world and poverty and conflict zones. But all far away from home, right?

Wrong.

For the past several months, we have been working with Amnesty International Canada on strategies to rally public support for the Lubicon Cree, a band of indigenous people who are living without land rights, stewardship of their traditional resources, or even drinkable water. In Canada.

You often hear about human rights horrors committed in the name of cheap oil. But once again, these stories tend to happen far away. This, however, is happening in Alberta.



This is a preview. You can watch the 20-minute documentary here.

The Lubicon, you see, have the misfortune of having their ancestral lands sitting on top of Canada's oil sands — a massive, if "dirty", reserve of petroleum.

Says Amnesty:

"More than 2,600 oil and gas wells have been drilled on Lubicon Cree land in northern Alberta, Canada. This intensive development has taken place against the wishes of the Lubicon people and has led to tragic consequences for their society. Even more destructive forms of development – including oil sands extraction – are planned for the future.

International human rights bodies have long been critical of the poverty, widespread ill-health and culture loss that has resulted from the near total destruction of the Lubicon economy and way of life.."

And it's not just Amnesty who have given this issue, and Canada's human rights record, world attention on this issue. In 1990, the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled that Canada had failed to protect the Lubicon Cree's rights by allowing the development of logging, oil and gas on the community's traditional hunting and trapping lands. (not that Canada is showing the UN much respect these days...)

So why don't the Lubicon just move, you might ask? Would you leave your homeland to someone who was planning to rip it apart?

The Lubicon situation is further complicated by the fact that they never signed a treaty with the British Crown. The sad truth is that when Canadian government commissioners negotiated Treaty 8 with other northern Alberta "Indians" in 1899 they travelled down the the Athabasca and Peace rivers and missed the "isolated community" who were not on the route.

In the many years since, there have been some federal government attempts to reconcile this mistake, but no mutually satisfactory deal has been reached. In the meantime, the Province of Alberta, which manages its own oil and gas development, continues to grant licences to global oil companies to exploit these "Crown Lands".

And how does this all relate back to Blog Action Day? It's something in the water.

In 1992, Lubicon Cree Rose Ominayak read this statement to the Alberta Commission of Review:

"Our children are sick from drinking water that oil has spilled in. They are sick from breathing the poisoned and polluted air the pulp mill has made. We are sick from eating animals, animals that are sick from disease from poisoned plants and water. Our children have nothing–they can’t breathe–even that has been taken. Their culture, the bush life, has been destroyed by development. When we were young we lived in the bush–it was a good life. Now, we have no traplines, nothing to hunt. There are no jobs, no money to live a decent life. We see ourselves, our men and our children falling into despair, hopelessness, low self-esteem and drinking. Families are broken like never before. Drinking and violence rise as our spirits fall."

So what can you do about this injustice? First of all, you need to get informed. Visit Amnesty's Justice for the Lubicon Cree site, or join the Facebook Page Speak up for the rights of the Lubicon Cree. Then, whether you are Canadian or not, you can take action by making your voice heard.

For their — and for all of our — futures.

Ozzy does John for Amnesty

Via Popeater, here is Ozzy Osbourne's cover of John Lennon's 1971 song "How" from the iconic Imagine album. (Click pic for vid)



October 9, 2010, marks what would have been the 70th birthday for the ex-leader of The Beatles, and this December 8, it will be 30 years since he was murdered in cold blood by a total asshole.

The cover is available exclusively on iTunes with all proceeds benefiting Amnesty's human rights efforts around the globe.

From the article:

"This year the whole world is celebrating the 70th anniversary of John's birth," Yoko Ono tells Amnesty. "His spirit and influence is stronger than ever. John shared a common purpose with Amnesty International - shining a light on wrongs and campaigning to protect people's rights. We all shine on!"

Amnesty's USA's Executive Director Larry Cox says of Osbourne's effort, "Once again Yoko Ono has shared the extraordinary legacy of her husband's music to make a difference in the lives of those who have no voice. We continue to be enormously grateful to her for her support and generosity. Yoko and John Lennon were devoted to seeking a better world and used the power of their artistry to work toward that goal. Ozzy Osbourne's gift, with Sharon Osbourne's strong and generous support, makes the same powerful statement today: that individuals can make a difference when they join with others who share a commitment to justice and freedom."

Don't look now...

Reader Patrick B. sent me an interesting item on an experimental "aware" ad in Hamburg, Germany, that "sees" when it's being viewed.

Placed by Amnesty International, it uses a camera to determine if it's being looked at head-on, then changes the creative from a contented-looking couple to a man battering his partner as you look away. (I have no idea what happens in a crowded bus stop, BTW...) The headline reads "It happens when nobody is watching".

Here's what it looks like:



Powerful stuff, with a focussed message. And while it won a silver at Cannes, Copyranter points out that it's a one-off intended for that sole purpose.

Hopefully, though, this technology will add to the arsenal of social marketers trying to make a real difference. Although its consumer applications could get annoying (remember the urinal ads that talked to you while you peed?) the international press this ad is garnering should at least add to awareness on the issue.

Award info and full credits are here.