Pulp Marketing – EGM
EGM stands for EthnoGraphic Media. The company makes documentaries on contemporary social causes, and builds grassroots efforts to address those social challenges.
From my [brand strategy] perspective, the trick has to do with managing the inevitable backlash that comes when arm’s length, marketing and fashion-driven causes slip out of fashion, and how people who have invested heavily in one cause drum up enthusiasm for the next.
What is the pressing issue today? Darfur? Rwanda? AIDS? Clean water? Teen suicide? The environment? Racial reconciliation? None of these issues have been resolved, but different movements generate enthusiasm at different times, and to different extents. And any one of these causes is worth a lifetime’s dedicated passion. Many efforts to address the challenges are hugely compelling, and hugely rewarding for the people who join the effort. But then the next cause and the next movement comes along, and it’s newer, or shinier, or seems to trump the old cause, or whatever, and people move to the next thing.
At some point, it makes sense that people would start to feel manipulated, and would start to feel like maybe they’re being flaky for not sticking with a single cause.
What excites me about EGM is not the specific cause, nor the specific movie, nor the specific effort to address a problem. What excites me is how EGM has the potential to prevent the backlash by preemptively addressing the flaky-factor by showing how people who move between causes are, indeed, highly consistent.
What remains constant in a person who moves from cause to cause is THEIR POSTURE toward the world. They want to be people who consider the needs of other people, and who work to serve. They go where the need is, and they stay loyal to the call of service – even if they don’t seem to be all that loyal to specific expressions of service.
Part of my role as “salt” in the world is to slow decay. The specific impact I want to have in my work with EGM is to slow the decay of idealism and servant-heartedness in an age of fickle fashion and nifty need.
My design partner, Mark Arnold, and I have been working on a variety of projects with EGM, and while it’s still an emerging organization that’s still getting its legs under itself, I’m very in love with what it can become.
Here’s the vision book we created for the organization. It will be easier to read if you blow it out to full screen. The pages are set to turn every 20 seconds, but you can pause or forward them at your own speed. Also, pages 11a and 11b are fold-out pages in the printed version. (BONUS POINTS: Can you name all of the move posters we clipped from to create page 16?)
