O.C. ENTERPRISE / ANNE MICHAUD : Helping Firms Become Socially Responsible : Costa Mesa ad agency run by two women shows clients how to stand up and be counted for doing the right thing.
Shelley Ervin and Lea Pascoe have collected evidence.
They have an ad from Florsheim shoes, for example, offering a $10 gift certificate to every customer who donates worn shoes to the Salvation Army. There’s another ad, from boot-maker Timberland, promising to give a percentage of its sales to City Year, the urban youth corps based in New York City. “Give racism the boot,” the Timberland ad reads.
Garden Promenade, a restaurant in Garden Grove, proclaims in another ad, “Excess is out. Value is in.”
Ervin and Pascoe say those ads and other evidence are heralding a new age, at least in the world of marketing. They have formed a company called Open Communications in Costa Mesa that they describe as “an activist-type agency advocating socially responsible communications.”
That means advertising campaigns that are, at the least, honest and that do not attempt to sell products by exploiting people’s insecurities.
That is the basic requirement for the work Ervin and Pascoe do. Beyond that, they want to help clients stand up as leaders in social responsibility--whether the cause is AIDS or child abuse or providing shoes for the destitute.
“There’s a groundswell of concern out there, and we want to help people express it,” said Pascoe, 38, who is the visual artist of the team. “You don’t have to wear Earth shoes and eat granola and not shave your under arms to work for change. You can deal in your own sphere of influence.”
For example, one of their clients, Doug Clark, runs a candy company in Phoenix, and he had also written a book about the environment. But he hadn’t thought to link the two parts of his life.
Open Communications created an ad for Clark Candy’s Breath Bombs breath mints that says a percentage of the product’s proceeds will go to help the environment. The ad pictures a romance comic image of a woman embracing a man and saying, “Oh, Bobby! I love what Breath Bombs does for your breath AND our planet.”
For the Mall of Orange last holiday season, Ervin and Pascoe put together a series of newspaper ads promoting the mall’s Toys for Tots collection area and some family style events, such as photos with Santa. “The best things in life are free,” the ad read. “Come share in the spirit.”
After a year in business, Pascoe and Ervin have just three clients (the third is a local savings bank they would not identify). So the 2% of their revenue that they donate, before salaries, to the city of Santa Ana Children’s Trust Fund is not a large sum.
But Ervin said she has learned from experience that you can’t wait until you make a lot of money to do the right thing.
Ervin, 44, is the team’s copywriter. She previously ran a Newport Beach ad agency, Ervin/Taft. “I always told myself that after my company was very successful, I’d do all the things I believed in,” Ervin said.
The company sank into financial difficulties after an embezzlement by an employee, however, and Ervin and her partner lost their working capital.
“It took a huge crisis to wake me up,” she said, “and show me the way to a richer, healthier life.”
Ervin, who grew up in Los Angeles, is the daughter of politically active parents. She remembers working on Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign as a young girl.
As a student at the USC, Ervin picketed to protest the Vietnam War. She dropped out of school to become an investigative reporter. But the journalism career didn’t work out, and she turned her writing talent to advertising.
Before forming Open Communications, Ervin worked for a time for the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey. The Institute, founded in 1985, holds workshops on ethical questions, conducts surveys and publishes a magazine.
Pascoe said she has known since the age of 5 that she wanted to be an artist. She was born in Asia and traveled across this country and South America with her family when she was a child.
During her college years, she backpacked across the United States on $5 a day.
The pair think their business ideals are going to find acceptance among fellow Baby Boomers. “They’re among the most educated, world-aware and sophisticated of generations,” Pascoe said. They will respond to the advertising message, she said, that “we’re all human, the product is what it is, you don’t have to hype it, and, in fact, it’s wrong to do so.”
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