Tool and BBDO NY Launch Crowdsourced Charitable Website for Starbucks/Project RED Partnership to Raise Funds in Fight Against AIDS
Tool of North America and Aaron Koblin, working in collaboration with BBDO NY, led an all-star digital team including Tool's Carlos Ulloa, to create a comprehensive website supporting the Starbucks Love Project - a partnership with RED, an organization devoted to wiping out AIDS in Africa. Koblin and the Tool team custom built the website to provide multiple visitor-participation options that each resulted in a donation from Starbucks, including an interactive worldwide sing-along to The Beatles' All You Need Is Love, a crowdsourced tapestry of "Love Drawings," containing user-generated drawings symbolizing love, and a CD mixed by international multimedia music group Playing for Change.
"It's an affirmation of Tool's expertise in digital that BBDO, who has such a rich history creating campaigns for the integrated space would seek us out to help with such an important initiative," noted Tool Digital EP Dustin Callif. "It's important to Tool to work on projects that are both creatively innovative and charitable in purpose. These types of initiatives allow us to tap into the top digital talent that we work with such as Aaron Koblin. Aaron was eager to take this on and he did a really spectacular job on every part of the site."
The initial site launch on Nov. 17 allowed users to learn about the Love Project and watch embedded videos of all four tracks on the exclusive-to-Starbucks Red Love CD. Tool's Carlos Ulloa developed an interactive CD done in Papervision3D, to highlight the impressive song list: a multi-artist cover of All You Need is Love, U2's I Believe in Father Christmas, Dave Matthews Band's You & Me, and John Legend's Redemption Song. When customers spend $15 at the store, they will receive the CD free and Starbucks will donate one dollar to the Global Fund to help Fight AIDS in Africa.
Koblin's expertise in "crowdsourcing" - corralling the resources of many individuals to achieve a greater goal traditionally achieved by a large entity - came though in one of the more unique elements of the website. The "Love Gallery" is an enormous piece of interactive, user-generated artwork that can be expanded infinitely. The Love Gallery appears onscreen as a giant graphic rectangle comprised of many tiny squares, each housing a drawing symbolizing one person's idea of love. Anyone can create their own drawing using an easy-to-use art tool that Koblin designed, which operates with three colors, four brush sizes, four brush strokes, and a blank canvas. For each of the first one million drawings added to the love gallery, Starbucks is contributing five cents to the battle against AIDS in Africa.
Another dynamic site element - an interactive music page - went live Dec. 7th. Visitors can add their voice to a montage of over 170 recording artists from all over the world who simultaneously sang All You Need is Love, streamed live online, in the largest music production in history. As more and more people add to the track, the result will be a worldwide coalition of voices symbolically joined in a unified front against AIDS. Tool coordinated closely with Gorgeous director Chris Palmer - which choreographed the mass event - to make the musical archive perpetually available, allow new visitors to add their voices, and provide videos of each performance. For each new voice added to the track, Starbucks is donating five cents to fight AIDS in Africa. All You Need Is Love became the first-ever satellite-linked worldwide broadcast 40 years ago, and Tool's diligent digital efforts - and their ability to unify disparate peoples for a worthy cause - epitomize the information revolution that has transformed the world in that time. Contributors to both the voice upload and the love drawings receive email confirmation and a link allowing them to view and share their submission.
In a tacit show of confidence in the Tool-designed site, Starbucks launched a huge promotion of the Love Project website, including an email newsletter; updates on Starbucks.com; an MSI blog post; announcements to their five million Facebook fans and 500,000 Twitter followers; digital advertising across Hulu, Pandora, Huffington Post, and other sites; and full day homepage ads on the websites of The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, GOOD, Salon, the New York Post, and imeem.
Credits:
Client: Starbucks
Site: Love Project
Launch: December 2009
Agency: BBDO, NY
CCO: David Lubars
Director of Integrated Production: Brian DiLorenzo
GCD(s): David Carter, Linda Honan
Interactive CD: Arturo Aranda
AD: Alex Shulhafer, Rob Seale
Producer: Jesse Brihn
Digital Producer: Sumeera Rasul
Head of Digital Production: Andy Bhatt
Digital Prod Co: Tool of North America
Interactive Director: Aaron Koblin
EP(s): Brian Latt, Jennifer Siegel
EP Digital: Dustin Callif
Digital Producer: Justin Bain
Jr. Digital Producer: Sasha Koehn
Flash Architect(s): Craig Bryant, Michael Sanders, Tom Stanley
Papervision 3D: Carlos Ulloa
Motion and Presentation Layer: Hector Monerris
Data Services: Craig Bryant, Michael Sanders, Mustafa Shabib, Jeremy Reichardt
Front End Development: Ricardo Cabello
Production Company: Gorgeous@Anonymous
Director: Chris Palmer
EP: Paul Rothwell
EP/Head of Commercials: Dave Morrison
QA/Testing: Steve Paulson/The Testing Guys
Sound Design: Christophe Eagleton/Eagleton Productions
About Tool:
Bicoastal Tool of North America represents top-tier artists to the advertising industry. Tool's collective of talent includes: directors, photographers, cinematographers, technologists, mobile content creators, and video game creatives. This diverse talent pool affords Tool the ability to serve as a resource for agencies across commercial and digital productions, packaging the best creative teams available to develop compelling advertising with our agency partners.
