It’s a gripping story of 2 star-crossed lovers. John is a humdrum everyman who thinks he knows everything, and is perfectly content going to work every day and making money. He never knew the dolphins, never knew the butterflies, and most of all, never had a reason to care….UNTIL SHE CAME ALONG. Susie’s a hip sassy girl out to save the world. She thinks she has a handle on how to make the world a better place…UNTIL HE COMES ALONG. John is impervious to her usual tricks….protesting, petitioning, legislating, nothing seems to work. But then comes a shocking twist that will leave you riveted to your chair! Susie finally comes up with a way to get John’s attention and the fireworks that ensue teach both characters profound lessons about life and love. A smart romantic comedy, this animation is a delight for children and adults alike!

Hahaha. I don’t know why I wrote that. There’s not really romance in it, but maybe we’ll put a love story in the sequel. So check it out and let us know what you think. I (Brent) wrote up the idea for it, and then handed it over to an awesome animator named Allan Dye who made it happen. Thanks also to Dave Isen and HORSE the Band for letting us use their music for the finale for free.

So let’s have some feedback on this thing, eh?

How Organized Consumer Purchasing Can Change Business from carrotmob on Vimeo.

Strengths:

Cute/cuddly/fun/positive

Explains why Carrotmob can be more effective than traditional activism

Not a word is spoken, so it works in any language (we can later edit the last screen to make translated versions).

Short enough that most viewers will probably not get bored.

Weaknesses:

Doesn’t explicitly make it clear that people are buying products. It might look like we’re asking people to donate money just to pay for companies to clean up their own messes, when that’s not really the case.

Doesn’t show an example of businesses competing to see who can be more socially responsible and win the carrot. This is something I initially wrote into the script, but it would have made the thing too long and expensive to animate. Does it work without the competition element?

Let us know what you think in the comments!

Hey everyone, as you can see we got rid of the old Carrotmob website. About time, eh? The old site looked about as appealing as a textbook about tax law. Our own Aaron has whipped up a prettier site for us. It will continue to morph over time, but hopefully it’s a nice start.

So you may be wondering, is this the long-awaited all-powerful Carrotmob application we’ve been promising? The swiss army knife we can use to do anything of a Carrotmobby nature? Not quite. We have more innovations we’ll be rolling out in the weeks ahead. But this is a start. You may be curious why it is taking us a long time for us to get to the next step for Carrotmob. Perhaps an explanation is in order: Basically we have zero people working on Carrotmob full-time. Virgance is actually now a whopping 13 people, but none of those 13 are fully-focused on Carrotmob. How could this be? Is Carrotmob not worthy of our fullest attention? Is the mob not hungry for more delicious carrots? Is Carrotmob not the hottest thing in town? Now, now, calm down everyone. If there’s one person who wants to see Carrotmob grow it’s me, your humble blog author. But I want to see Carrotmob grow in a sustainable way, and also in a super powerful and effective way. Let me explain how our current plan fulfills that goal:

First, we need to make sure Virgance is financially stable. You may have heard that the economy died. It’s a dangerous time to be starting a business, obvy. We feel great about our future, but it’s important that we keep our eye on the ball. We’re bringing in some money from investors, and most of you know about 1BOG our other program that is really kicking right now. But none of the 13 people at Virgance have gotten a single full paycheck yet. We’re close to paying people good money, but we’re not exactly in cruise control yet. So how do we approach the choice between spending our time on Carrotmob or spending our time on something like 1BOG? Well they are both awesome community-based ways to change the world. We have big communities excited about both programs. The press is excited about both programs. They are both novel ways to take advantage of economics to make the world better. The difference is that 1BOG is bringing in money RIGHT NOW, and we haven’t even made a final decision on how we are going to monetize Carrotmob.

So that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. If we put all our resources into Carrotmob right now, it would mean that no money would come in, and we would risk everything falling apart. But putting resources into 1BOG is an investment in Carrotmob, because it enables us to get moving on Carrotmob sooner. Capiche? So the best thing you can do for Carrotmob may be to tell people about 1bog.org!

So anyway, just wanted to drop a little info about this on you all, since otherwise you might think we were working all day every day on Carrotmob and just doing a really pathetic job at executing anything. It’s not like that. The excitement here is electric! We just got written up in The Economist and also just won an award in Paris, and we have lots of momentum in ways that just haven’t been manifesting themselves on this website. Today’s redesign is a good first step towards the future! What do you guys think of the look?