Marketing with Meaning Still Means You're Selling Something

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The WPP Group [9]'s online advertising firm Bridge Worldwide offers its clients what it calls "marketing with meaning [10]." For ConAgra [11], the firm created the "Start Making Choices" website [12], which "conveys nutrition, exercise and other well-being tips from cardiologist James Rippe ... as it weaves in messages and sponsorship from the company's Healthy Choice, Eggbeaters, Hunt's, Orville Redenbacher and Pam brands." To promote Abbott Laboratories [13]' Glucerna brand products for diabetics, Bridge created a "Diabetes Control for Life" program. The program website [14] offers food and health tips, which Bridge says help "participants lose weight and have better blood-sugar management," while "Glucerna product consumption increases ninefold." Using a similar approach, Johnson & Johnson [15] "has funded what it calls the world's largest database on children's sleep," which just happens to "point out to parents that giving their babies a bath before bedtime helps get them to sleep (which doesn't hurt the world's largest purveyor of baby bath soap)."