Archive for Living Your Dreams
Mastercard’s “Priceless”: Do Virtues Translate?
Posted by: | CommentsWe have featured several commercials from Mastercard’s “Priceless” campaign on AdVirtues. In fact, the campaign was featured on the Getting It Right page as an example of a consistently virtuous, heart-warming, and inspiring campaign. However, one of my favorite “Priceless” spots has not yet been mentioned and taking another look at the ad brought up some interesting questions for me, namely can virtues, or more specifically virtuous advertising, translate across cultures?
Take a look at Mastercard’s “My Favorite Things,” and below I will consider some of the implications in the relationship between international or multicultural and virtuous advertising.
In my opinion, virtuous advertising could present itself as either one of the most problematic forms of advertising, in terms of translation into international or ethnic markets, or as one of the greatest opportunities for advertisers to gain a true understanding and connect with those markets.
“Dream in Color” with Target
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Target has come out with a new campaign for Black History Month: “Dream in Color“.* The television ads showcase the personal hardships and accomplishments of now famous and successful African American women. The goal of the campaign is to inspire others to work hard and never give up on pursuing their dreams (similar to the stories about Tyler Perry and Michael Jordan seen in earlier posts on this site). The four amazing women featured in the TV ads include Holly Robinson Peete, Bethann Hardison, Thelma Golden, and India.Arie. These women speak to the issues of Legacy, Beauty, Education, and Community in several short video interviews posted on the site.
In addition to the ads showcasing these four women, Target has partnered with the Smithsonian Institution and Scholastic to provide free Black History Month lesson plans to teachers.
Throughout this campaign Target seeks to celebrate, educate, and inspire others, specifically within the context of diversity. An extension of the “Dream in Color” campaign (which is intended to run for an entire year), also found on the website, includes video interviews with other successful artists, designers, and community leaders including John Legend, Emilio Estefan, and Sami Hayek.
All of the videos in this campaign emphasize ambition, believing in yourself, common ground, determination, encouragement, hard work, hope, inspiration, living your dreams, overcoming, perseverance, strength, etc, etc, etc… through the personal stories of these individuals. Basically, they hit on a lot of the virtues we promote on this site. I think the overarching theme here, and one we so desperately need to hear in these difficult times, is to take personal responsibility and LIVE YOUR DREAMS, a.k.a. “Dream in Color”.
*Unfortunately, I am not able to post the videos directly onto the blog because of Target’s restrictions. However, all videos are available through the link above.
