AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION
AMA.ORG
JULY 2014
DEPTH OF
FIELD A R T N O T WA R I S H E L P I N G NONPROFITS BRING THEIR S TORIES TO LIFE
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Expert insights on mobile, branding and global business
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DEPTH of
FIELD With the founders’ roots in documentary film, literature, music and political activism, Brooklyn-based creative agency Art Not War is helping nonprofits bring their stories to life
BY MOLLY SOAT | STAFF WRITER
msoat@ama.org
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A LT R U I S M A N D I N S P I R AT I O N A B O U N D
in the nonprofit marketing industry. Impassioned staffers toil tirelessly in an effort to spread the word about—and boost engagement in— their worthy causes. This work often is a low-budget or no-budget enterprise, but in a corner of the marketplace in which savvy storytelling is paramount for marketing success and the key to engaging today’s target audiences goes far beyond distributing an informative brochure, nonprofit marketers need creative resources that often are beyond their reach. Enter Laura Dawn and Daron Murphy, co-founders of Art Not War, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based creative agency and production studio that specializes in developing advocacy campaigns for left-leaning nonprofits and socially conscious businesses. Dawn and Murphy create TV commercials, Web videos, infographics, short-form documentaries and original music—all with slick, professional production values achieved within a nonprofit marketer’s meager budget.
The firm’s mission, as stated on its website, is: “We make meaningful media that compels viewers to share and brings vital attention to the campaigns that can change the world. We ONLY work with clients with aligned progressive values. … We’re artists and activists, not entrepreneurs. We are a mission—not a business venture. We exist to make the world a more equitable and peaceful place, and will do our utmost to work with any organization with a righteous cause, even in the face of the most challenging budget constraints.” The Art Not War team has collaborated with Hollywood A-listers, musicians and high-profile activists, such as Oliver Stone, Matt Damon, John Cusack, Heather Graham, Scarlett Johansson, Olivia Wilde, Jon Hamm, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Moby, Bruce Springsteen, The Roots, John Cougar Mellencamp, Modest Mouse, Aimee Mann, Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam, Russell Simmons, Salman Rushdie and Michael Moore.
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The firm’s projects aim to bring attention to causes from nuclear weapon abolition to voter suppression to reproductive rights. Clients include Rebuild the Dream, Safer Chemicals, Food Democracy Now, the Brady Campaign and Occupy Wall Street. The firm produces all of the media projects for social change site MoveOn.org, including TV and radio ads, online videos and infographics intended to be shared on social media. It also has created videos for Fair Girls, a nonprofit that provides social aid to humantrafficking survivors, as well as for the social activism site MomsRising.org and the New York State Nurses Association, among others. Dawn, Murphy and their team handle these projects from start to finish. Their firm’s full-service creative offerings include campaign planning, research, script and storyboard development, casting and artist outreach, design and animation, media production, ad placements, PR, earned media strategies, social media outreach—everything
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necessary to execute seed marketing strategies in an attempt to get clients’ messages to go viral. The co-founders tap their staff ’s creative backgrounds and their network’s artistic skills to help boost their clients’ causes to front-page status, garnering global attention from media outlets including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, The Huffington Post, Politico and MSNBC— and even Fox News. THE STORY TELLERS
Neither Dawn nor Murphy is a marketer by training. Both come from artistic backgrounds, and started their careers in the music and media industries. Dawn attended college at the Central University of Iowa, studied English and theater, and then moved to New York in 1993, where she became the lead singer of an all-girl punk band. To make ends meet, she took a job on the creative team at the
New York-based financial services firm Lehman Brothers. “I had management and computer skills while also having a great network of artists within my social circles,” she says. After graduating from Boston College in 1992 with a degree in English literature, Murphy moved to New York to pursue a career in music and pop journalism, working for Entertainment Weekly, Men’s Vogue and WSJ magazine, among others. In 1995, he co-founded the multimedia department of one of the earliest online magazines, Word.com, wearing many hats, he says, in the video and content creation departments. In 2001, he earned a Webby Award nomination for the site’s online videogame, Sissyfight 2000. Dawn and Murphy met while playing in a rock band in the 1990s in New York’s East Village, and soon became partners in life and business. “Around the time that George [W.] Bush became president, we both got more involved with activism,” Murphy says.
DA R O N
L AU RA
The Art Not War team. Back row, from left: Adrian Alexis, Daron Murphy, Eddie Geller, David Ambrose. Front row, from left: Michelle Manning, Laura Dawn, Ananda Khan, Sarah Kinsley-Brooks, Aaron Brooks.
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Dawn and Ambrose direct and shoot “Revealed: The GOP Strategy,” a 2012 video about Mitt Romney’s voter suppression tactics. The video won the 2013 Reed Award for “Best Web Video: Presidential Candidate.”
“We both shared a passion for what [progressive social activists] were fighting for.” While on tour as a singer with Moby, Dawn collaborated with the recording artist in their spare time and came up with the idea for “Bush in 60 Seconds,” a crowdsourced media campaign in which Internet users could create and post satirical antiBush ads online. Dawn pitched the campaign idea to MoveOn.org in 2003, and MoveOn.org bit, going so far as to offer Dawn a full-time position on its cultural team. “My job was to do anything and everything I could think of to get MoveOn members, and the things they wanted to advocate for, into the cultural landscape of ideas and into pop-culture conversation,” she says. She and her team won the Paul Wellstone Citizen Leadership Award, and went on to create online videos, books and TV ads, and organized fundraising concerts. Murphy also joined the MoveOn.org team soon after, signing on as a freelance video producer. CREATING A STIR
In 2011, Dawn and Murphy left MoveOn to launch their own firm with MoveOn’s freelance film producer, David Ambrose, opening up shop in Brooklyn. Dawn serves as chief creative director, handling the firm’s “large-scale creative vision,” she says, overseeing the creative process from shoot to edit
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to final delivery. She also is in charge of artist relations and event coordination, writes scripts and co-directs media. Murphy is executive director, charged with PR and general production tasks. And Ambrose is technical director, who takes the reins on shooting, editing and post-production for all of the videos, although all three are quick to point out that they each wear many hats in the small firm. They formed a nine-person team, adding staffers with experience in production, writing, editing, styling and animation, and recruiting freelance help to cover everything that they’d need to be a one-stop shop for creative production and distribution, Dawn says. “When people hire a PR firm or an agency, they are putting together a different team to do the production each time and that’s something that I encountered when I was the creative director at MoveOn. The results sometimes would be all over the place,” she says. “We’ve worked together for so long that when I sit down to oversee the final edit with Dave, we’re finishing each other’s thoughts. There’s a real level of personal relationship and experience. That’s special because it’s really rare that a creative agency is also the production team.” Art Not War is one of several firms launched by former MoveOn employees, says Anna Galland, executive director of MoveOn.org. MoveOn has become an incubator, of sorts, for
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nonprofit-focused media, PR and outreach organizations such as progressive Washington, D.C.based PR firm Fitzgibbon Media, women’s rights group UltraViolet, and Color of Change, an advocacy group for African-Americans. In other words, there were no hard feelings when Dawn and Murphy left MoveOn, and poached talent like Ambrose. In fact, MoveOn became Art Not War’s first regular client. “Laura and her team sit in on check-ins about what’s moving in the political environment, what campaigns our members have currently prioritized,” Galland says. “It’s a two-way street, a very collaborative relationship. Art Not War is tightly integrated with our campaign team and our internal conversations about what issues we are seeing emerging, what moments we see coming up, as well as longer-term organizational needs. … The work that she does for Art Not War is continuous with the work for MoveOn in that it’s based on a very deep value set. It’s smart and funny and edgy, and is always looking at how they can make the world better.” The MoveOn network of talent serves as a freelance talent pool for Art Not War. Fitzgibbon Media is a media placement partner. Dawn and Murphy also have used their contacts from MoveOn to grow their client base, tapping Trevor Fitzgibbon, founder of Fitzgibbon Media and formerly a MoveOn PR rep, for client referrals. Fitzgibbon says that he’s happy to send his clients their way, since working with Art Not War dovetails well with his ideals and business practices. “The progressive media space is not huge, and Laura and Daron have really solid name recognition,” Fitzgibbon says. “People know what they’ve done in the past [for MoveOn]. People respect them for what they’ve done. They also produce a really good product at an affordable price. In the economy we’re in right now, not a lot of nonprofit progressive organizations can afford all of those big boys. … As a firm, it’s David versus Goliath. Those are our clients. I feel a kinship with Art Not War” and the firm’s underdog-focused mission, he says. FILLING THE FRAME
Dawn and Murphy are selective when taking on new clients, adhering to their mission to work only with clients whose progressive values align with their own. “I consider myself an activist first, so we don’t work on anything we aren’t passionate about,” Dawn says. “I actually turn down clients. There’s a lot of AstroTurf out there and because we’ve been doing this for 20 years, we have a pretty good nose for stuff like that.
… Of course, sometimes it would be much easier to just take the money and let the chips fall where they may, but I feel like in the long term, the trust that we’ve built would be broken. It’s in the best interest of our business to be really choosy about who we work with.” That “choosiness” appeals to the celebrities who Dawn and Murphy recruit to act as spokesmen or ambassadors for the causes. Most of the celebrities work pro bono, donating time and talent because they share Art Not War’s passion for the causes in question. “For over a decade, I’ve collaborated with Laura and Daron of Art Not War on various social justice issues because I trust them,” Moby said in an e-mailed statement. “I trust their values, I trust their instincts, I trust their intelligence, I trust their creativity and I trust them to make great media. They’re smart, strategic, and approach progressive values with intelligence, emotion and humor. And most of all, when I’ve worked with them, we’ve made an impact.” In 2010, as Dawn and Murphy were in the early stages of forming their own company, Dawn wrote a “get out the vote” video script with Onion News Network writer Yaniv Raz in which a dystopian America is run by war-happy Sarah Palin and ruled by the “RepubliCorp.” Dawn reached out to Olivia Wilde, an actress whom she had befriended while creating MoveOn content during the 2008 presidential election and with whom she shares similar political leanings. Dawn e-mailed the script to Wilde while she was on a film set and Wilde immediately signed on, adjusting her filming and flight schedules to accommodate the video’s one-day shoot. Many of Art Not War’s videos are intended to spread awareness about constantly changing political movements and charities that ebb and flow with the 24/7 news cycle, so the team is focused on understanding what topics are hot at any given moment. “Since most of our clients don’t have millions of dollars to throw at growing or sustaining their brand, creating something that people will actually share is hugely important,” Murphy says, so tying a nonprofit’s cause to a current event boosts the cause’s chances of getting on consumers’ radars. “It’s an ever-moving target, but today we’re paying attention to why people share, what they share and how they share, and trying to make things that fit into this moment. Storytelling plays a huge part in that, too. It informs how we tell a story if we think about why people share.” For MoveOn.org, for example, Dawn and Murphy work with MoveOn’s communications director to
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identify news items or political movements that might be in their infancy, and they all work to flesh out the topic with ideas for videos that will, hopefully, go viral. “Their team is tightly integrated with our campaigning team,” Galland says. “They’re on e-mail threads. They hop on phone calls to talk about ideas that are percolating. What we’re always looking for is the sweet spot between a campaign that our members care deeply about; an opportunity to make an intervention in that campaign that will actually be helpful and useful, and will be a worthy use of our members’ resources; and a good enough idea to implement that opportunity. When we get all three of those things lined up, then Art Not War is off and running with a creative process for us. … As a firm, they bring this real execution ability, but a lot of their value is in their radars for what’s interesting, what’s sharp and what might be worth fleshing out.”
“Most of our clients need to react to current events quickly, with the highest production value and something that works with their budget. … I always think, How do we get a product done fast, cheap and really awesome?” –Laura Dawn, Art Not War Most of Art Not War’s videos are turned around within 48 hours—a necessity, Dawn says, to stand out in the wash of media coverage that comes after a natural disaster, a government action or a social issue becomes front-page news. MoveOn or other nonprofit clients must get their message out while their particular topic is top of mind. “Our entire process with clients, even our creative brief, is designed for that quick conversion. Most of our clients need to react to current events quickly, with the highest production value and something that works with their budget. … I always think, How do we get a product done fast, cheap and really awesome? What happens in a rapid response environment, which is what we’re in, is that if you can’t get something out the door in 48 hours, you won’t enter the conversation.”
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SOWING THE SEEDS OF CHANGE
One of the largest, and most highly acclaimed, of Art Not War’s projects is a 30-second video for Fair Girls, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that provides housing, counseling and medical resources for female victims of human trafficking. In 2012, Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed in The New York Times outing Backpage.com, a classifieds website for adult services formerly owned by Village Voice Media, as a popular site for prostitution advertising online and mentioned Fair Girls as an advocate for survivors. The column sparked a media firestorm over human trafficking, which was, in the public’s mind, largely a problem happening overseas, says Andrea Powell, co-founder and executive director of Fair Girls. Powell and Fitzgibbon, as Fitzgibbon Media is Fair Girls’ media partner, wanted to leverage U.S. residents’ sudden awareness that human trafficking was happening within U.S. borders, so they commissioned Art Not War to create a TV ad to air during This Week with George Stephanopoulos and on MSNBC and Fox News. The ad features a young girl telling her story of being sold on Backpage.com. The dialogue was taken directly from court transcripts of the prosecution of one of Fair Girls’ client’s pimps. “There was, of course, a lot of sensitive engagement around the issue—everything from selecting the right actress who represented our clients to the right language in the script,” Powell says. “We really wanted the project to be as authentic as possible, and one of the things I appreciated with Art Not War is that they really understood that, even though we had to move quickly, we still needed to take the time to build that rapport, be sensitive and really understand the issue.” Adds Fitzgibbon: “Child sex trafficking, you don’t see that every day on national television. If you do, it’s usually a CNN or MSNBC special about what’s happening internationally, not about what’s happening right down the street in Washington, D.C., or in hotel rooms across the country. We needed to create an ad and work with a team that knows what the complexities and hurdles are going to be to be able to create a PR opportunity that’s going to break through, that’s going to make it past producers when you’re competing for air time with the latest political scandal in Washington.” The ad garnered media coverage by outlets such as MSNBC, which invited Powell and the young actress to talk about Fair Girls. The organization also received coverage in The Wall Street Journal, The National Journal and Marie Claire, among others. The campaign’s accompanying MoveOn.org petition to
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A still from Art Not War’s “Greatest Generation” ad, written by documentarian Michael Moore.
shut down Backpage.com’s adult section received more than 50,000 signatures. The ad also garnered critical praise for Art Not War, winning seven awards in the American Association of Political Consultants’ 2013 Pollie Awards in Washington, D.C., including best of show in the television category. The advocacy campaign sparked some change from Backpage.com, although not exactly the mea culpa that Fair Girls was looking for. After some high-profile advertisers cancelled contracts with The Village Voice, Village Voice Media unloaded Backpage.com in a private sale to two of its executives. But the bigger boon came in the form of new initiatives from the Obama administration to combat human trafficking in the U.S. in September 2012. “Because of the media coverage, Fair Girls ended up getting a meeting with the Obama administration,” Dawn says. “A month later—and we think it wasn’t a coincidence—President Obama unveiled a multi-agency initiative to combat trafficking, from this one small thing, which we basically did at cost, or less than cost. There’s nothing that compares with creating something that actually has made a difference in some way. That’s huge. We’re really addicted to seeing something we made in this very intimate, emotional, personal process, and then on TV sparking conversation and making a difference. That’s everything to us.” The agency created another stir in 2012 when it helped liberal documentarian Michael Moore produce a video to appear on MoveOn.org that called Mitt Romney out for what Moore saw as voter-suppression tactics
during the 2012 presidential campaign. The video shows members of America’s “greatest generation” humorously— and profanely—threatening Romney if he attempted to discourage voter turnout. The video became one of MoveOn.org’s most watched and tweeted videos, and sparked another media storm. Despite Art Not War’s clearly liberal bent in clients and projects, Murphy says that it’s important to steer clear of propaganda and material that may alienate or draw criticism to a cause. “Since we always work with clients with a progressive political agenda, it’s important for us not to get too tangled up in the politics of something,” he says. “The way to do that, we’ve found, is by getting to the essential truth of whatever subject we’re tackling. That’s why we feature so many people’s stories in our work because if you tell a person’s story truthfully, no one can deny that truth. That truth speaks for itself and transcends politics.” Art Not War’s projects have come under fire from critics including Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, but Dawn and Murphy agree that all press is good press when Art Not War is trying to build awareness for a cause. The firm succeeds when it gets people talking, Dawn says. “If you can create something that’s so provocative or creative or funny or interesting, if there’s a hook to it that creates media interest, then you’re able to create the conditions for the conversations,” she says. “If we can get the opportunity to get on TV and square off with someone, and really inject their point of view into the conversation, then that’s a win. Sometimes we have to be provocative to create the conditions for that conversation to happen.” m
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