Promotion, marketing and broadcast design professionals will convene June 23-25 in New York for the annual PROMAX & BDA confab. With its award competitions and discussion sessions, the event serves to showcase the creative talent in—and the importance of—this industry sector. But arguably doing so even more eloquently—by adding the dimension of the power to do good—are a currently running public service campaign directed at ABC-TV as well as Disney Channel viewers, and an informational video targeting corporate sponsor employees.
The PSAs and the video promote The Great American Bake Sale and feature the casts of ABC’s Friday primetime series George Lopez, Married to the Kellys, Hope & Faith, Life With Bonnie and The Big House. Now in its second year, The Great American Bake Sale is a program designed to help end child hunger in America.
Minneapolis-based
branding, marketing and production house Met/Hodder, which also maintains a Burbank office, collaborated with partners Share Our Strength, which is a leading anti-hunger organization, Parade Magazine, ABC-TV, Betty Crocker and Tyson Foods to develop the campaign. In the spots and the video, stars from the aforementioned primetime series encourage viewers to host bake sales in their communities. The funds generated from these bake sales will then be donated to Share Our Strength, which awards grants to innovative nonprofits fighting childhood hunger in the United States.
Seventy-five percent of the grants fund summer and after-school meal programs in the states and local municipalities where the money was raised. The remaining 25 percent of the grant money goes to areas of extreme poverty like the Mississippi Delta; The Food and Action Research Center’s national child advocacy efforts; and anti-hunger organizations that administer Operation Frontline, Share Our Strength’s nutrition education program.
The latter recognizes the fact that children at risk of hunger need more than regular meals. Along with their parents, they need to know how to make healthy food choices so that they can get as much nutritional benefit as possible from the food they eat. Many food banks and other social service organizations provide nutrition education classes for low-income parents and their kids to help provide critically needed nutrition information and hands-on experience in preparing healthy meals with limited resources.
Underscoring the scope of the problem is a couple of sobering statistics. Some 13 million children in America are hungry or at risk of hunger. And every fourth person standing in a soup kitchen line is a child.
In its inaugural year of 2003, The Great American Bake Sale raised more than $1 million. The current campaign promoting year two debuted on April 4 and runs through July 25.
"It’s not often we have the opportunity to take part in such a worthwhile cause and we consider it a real privilege to get the word out about The Great American Bake Sale," related Mark Forman, West Coast executive producer for Met/Hodder, which also created and produced the ’03 campaign. Met/Hodder’s sister company Digital Bucket completed editorial, graphic animation, the final mix and finishing for the PSAs and the video.
For more information and/or to get involved, log onto www. greatamericanbakesale.org or call 1-800-761-4227.
