Wed, May 07, 2008 page9

• How to sell activism

  There are lots of good causes out there, but the public is limited in their ability to see how pressing they are. Cue the celebrities...

  • By Alex Williams / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  “Hitler is alive in Burma” reads the words scrawled on a cardboard sign held aloft by a sweet-faced Ellen Page, the Oscar-nominated star of Juno, in a 90-second human rights public awareness message that began showing on video-sharing Web sites last week.

  The spot is one of 30 produced for US Campaign for Burma, starring celebrities like Will Ferrell and Jennifer Aniston. They will be distributed on Fanista.com, a social networking and entertainment retail site, then passed along to sites like YouTube and Google Video every day for the next month.

  The goal of the campaign is to thrust the cause of human rights in Burma — now known as Myanmar — into the orbit of A-list activist causes, along with Tibet and Darfur, and to encourage international pressure on a government that activists say is one of the world’s most oppressive.

  

  Attention will not be easy to gain, let alone pressuring the junta. As with other global campaigns, activists must figure out how to make Americans care about a distant crisis with complex causes involving relatively unknown players. And they must also make themselves heard in the glut of worthy causes, all with a chorus of earnest celebrities crying “Urgent!”

  To do so, the Burma campaign has decided to use some of the same brand-building strategies — simplified narratives, clear-cut imagery and, of course, the most carefully selected celebrities -- used by other successful aid agencies, or even consumer goods marketers.

  “In a certain sense, you have to ‘brand’ it up,” said Jack Healey, the founder of the Human Rights Action Center, a partner in the Campaign for Burma. “It’s the nature of the business now.”

  And no wonder. The public today is bombarded by pleas to take action on global warming, Tibet, Darfur, breast cancer, starving children, Africans with AIDS, or Katrina victims, said Daniel Adler, the founder of Fanista.com. The company financed much of the series of spots, called “Burma: It Can’t Wait.”

  “The power of the Internet to create micro-communities has meant that there is support of micro-causes, so there are many more now than there ever have been,” Adler said.

  But the US Campaign for Burma will not be content to see Myanmar remain a micro-cause.

  Jeremy Woodrum, a founder of the group, believes Myanmar is near the top of the list of global priorities, even in a world full of troubles. He says the military dictatorship has enlisted the most child soldiers in the world and destroyed twice as many villages as the Sudanese have in Darfur.

  “There are a lot of situations, but really only a few that are extremely severe,” he said.

  “When you’re talking about 3,200 villages destroyed and a million and a half refugees, I mean, that’s not everywhere,” he said.

  “Our challenge,” he added, “is how to convey those facts publicly.”

  Many Americans, Woodrum said, “couldn’t find Burma on a map.”

  The most successful campaigns tend to have a built-in constituency in the US, Healey said. Darfur is of interest to some blacks, Healey said, since black Africans are the victims of what the US government calls genocide, and also to some Jews, who he said are often responsive to causes involving genocide.

  Myanmar has no such large base in the US. Partly for that reason, he said, the campaign’s total budget would “not equal one week of Darfur’s budget.”

  The hope is that celebrities could help raise the profile of the Burma campaign. Jim Carrey, an old friend of Healey, tapped his management company, the Mosaic Media Group, to deliver other stars it represents, like Sarah Silverman and Judd Apatow. Forest Whitaker, Anjelica Huston and Woody Harrelson have signed on as well.

  Diane Jones, a spokeswoman for Finca International, which promotes micro-loans in developing countries, acknowledged that some people think of her agency, founded in 1984, as only a few years old, since that’s when Natalie Portman became its celebrity face.

  But the campaign’s success may depend less on Hollywood and more on whether it can clearly convey the complex, closed world of Myanmar politics. The government, led since 1992 by Senior General Than Shwe, tightly controls the press and visitors are rarely permitted in.

  After three decades of isolationist totalitarian rule and multiple coups, the country held free elections in 1990. The National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, won 82 percent of the parliamentary seats, but the junta refused to relinquish power.

  Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, has spent about 12 of the last 18 years under house arrest, and has become to many a global symbol of nonviolent resistance. And Burma campaign organizers have decided to popularize the image of Suu Kyi as the Nelson Mandela of Myanmar.

  “Like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, her peaceful resistance represents the best in our nature,” wrote Carrey in an e-mail message. “And we have to support that.”

  But even people who know about Myanmar’s Mandela often cannot pronounce her name, he said.

  “If you don’t know the names,” Healey said, “you don’t have a campaign. If people are just saying, ‘that lady in Burma,’ then you’ve got nothing.”

  So the campaign seeks to remedy this by repeating her name in nearly every spot. In an early, prototype spot, self-produced by Carrey and released on YouTube last summer, the actor cobbles together a mnemonic device to help viewers remember the name (“Aung San sounds like ‘unsung,’ as in ‘unsung hero’”).

  A story that is going to hold people’s interest also needs a villain. While Shwe is a natural in the role, said Isaiah Seret, a 30-year-old music video director who was enlisted to write and direct the Ellen Page spot, the general also came with built-in drawbacks -- his name lacked impact, his face was forgettable. The general, Seret said, lacked what is known in marketing vernacular as a “unique selling point” — like Hitler’s mustache.

  So the director attempted to turn the general’s blandness into a joke. In the spot, Page scribbles a Hitler mustache on a large photo of the general and declares, “Make no mistake about it, he is a professional dictator.”

  Many of these mini-films are mini-narratives, with characters, a story arc and even humor. In part, they are intended to generate revenue for the Campaign for Burma. Ten percent of every purchase — CDs, video games and DVDs — by people who sign up for the option to support the Campaign for Burma on Fanista.com goes to the cause, Adler said.

  But the larger point of this campaign is to take advantage of the Web to create subversion inside the sealed-off country, Woodrum said.

  “The Burmese military regime and soldiers follow American culture,” he said. “You can watch movies there. So when people in Hollywood speak out against the military, it undermines them against their own troops. That’s very important. It’s like when rock and rollers spoke out against Soviets. If you talk to Vaclav Havel, he’ll say that Lou Reed’s support for human rights in Czechoslovakia was very important to the cause.”
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