Today I applaud MTV for promoting the use of entertainment to promote social change, a marriage I've been advocating for years, in a very visible way.

MTV Video Music Awards has a new award category this year: Best Video with a Message. AceShowBiz describes it this way:

It's a special category that recognizes artists who use their music videos to send positive messages of empowerment or raise awareness of social issues that youth are dealing with. 

And the messages range from self esteem (Lady Gaga's Born This Way) to domestic violence awareness (Eminem's Love the Way You Lie) to anti-bullying (Taylor Swift's Mean), among others. Big name nominees.

By creating an category for artists doing videos with positive social messages, MTV is bringing "entertainment-education" to a whole new level of credibility. It is clear recognition from within the entertainment industry. 

Now it's up to public health folks and social service agencies involved in these causes to leverage the buzz that this new MTV award will generate. Let's step up and do it!

Old fashioned bumper stickers are the medium of choice in this war of ideology taking place in laid-back Ocean Beach (OB), in San Diego County. OB has long been known as a liberal, safe and friendly haven for the homeless.

Compare the two bumper stickers. Both welcome people to friendly OB. The brown one says "Don't feed our bums" and was made by a local smoke shop to deal not the homeless they say, but the more aggressive panhandlers: 

"It isn't about the homeless...it's about the bums, the trolls that we deal with day in and day out, they get angry at you if you don't have spare change, they urinate in your doorways, graffiti on the buildings, it's terrible." said Denise Prigmore, an employee at The Black.

Many OB residents were angered and felt that the message portrays them as intolerant. Look what was created in response, by San Diego's Regional Task Force to End Homelessness.

Ideology and personal beliefs about homelessness aside, I see all forms of separatism, prejudice, and racism as a market segmentation issue. It involves dividing based on differences and uniting into subgroups based on similarities. Even good ideas like segmentation can be put to bad use. The positive segmentation challenge here is to distinguish between the "good" homeless and those that cause unnecessary harm and damage.

I just called a colleague - a seasoned business executive - who answered his cell phone, only to apologetically tell me he was in a meeting and could I call back later. See, it's not just teenagers! Emergency situations excepted, wouldn't it make more sense to not answer and let voice mail take over when one is busy? I often tell my kids that somehow I (and a few zillion other people) survived most of my life without a phone in my pocket. They look at me like I'm nuts.

Marketers know that "everything talks" - your ads, the quality of your work, your signage, and yes, even how you deal with phone calls. All these communications convey a message. When someone answers only to say they're too busy to talk, the message is either: 1) you're not important enough for me to stop what I'm doing, or 2) I'm addicted to my phone and can't stop myself from answering no matter where I am or what I'm doing.

A marketing by-product of our collective love affair with the cell phone is to use that relationship to gauge the importance of other relationships. Like "Which of these would be hardest to give up - your mother, your job, your sex life, or your cell phone? But seriously, the zealousness of cell phone use is a powerful marker by which a host of products and services can be profitably compared. Think about it.