Marketing with Meaning Still Means You're Selling Something

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The WPP Group's online advertising firm Bridge Worldwide offers its clients what it calls "marketing with meaning." For ConAgra, the firm created the "Start Making Choices" website, 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' Glucerna brand products for diabetics, Bridge created a "Diabetes Control for Life" program. The program website 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 "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)."