The Media Equation: Campaign Journalism in the Age of Twitter

For modern political reporters, the end of the day never arrives. There is no single narrative, only whatever is going on in the moment, often of little consequence, but always something that can be blogged, tweeted or filmed and turned into content.

In a study he did while at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard last spring, Peter Hamby, a political reporter at CNN, writes about the extent to which reporters in the bubble — on the bus, on the plane, at the rope line — have become “one giant, tweeting blob.”

Mr. Hamby is not some old geezer pining for the good old days. At 32, he is deeply immersed in the digital frontier of modern journalism — with a somewhat provocative presence on Twitter — and would never argue for going back to the good old days, which he and others say weren’t all that good anyway.

But there are implications to the new world, some of which go beyond the hermetic confines of the campaign media bubble. Because of the relentlessness of the schedule, the limited access and the multiplatform demands, many of the boys and girls on the bus are in fact boys and girls. And the bus they ride is Twitter.

According to Mr. Hamby, Mitt Romney’s campaign never came to terms with the new dynamic. Instead, his organization responded with a defensive crouch that fenced off the candidate from the very people he needed to reach.

“With Instagram and Twitter-primed iPhones, an ever more youthful press corps, and a journalistic reward structure in Washington that often prizes speed and scoops over context, campaigns are increasingly fearful of the reporters who cover them,” he writes in the report. (And sometimes the threat doesn’t come from the credentialed press — the “47 percent” video that nearly tipped over the Romney campaign was shot by someone who was on the catering staff at a fund-raiser.)

Zeke Miller, the very talented reporter for BuzzFeed (now of Time) was 2 years old when Bill Clinton was first elected president, and 22 when he was tasked with covering Mr. Romney.

“I never thought that age and talent were mutually exclusive, and Zeke did a great job,” Mr. Hamby said in a phone call from South Carolina where he was doing some reporting for the 2016 presidential campaign (speaking of things that are out of control) as the governors and potential candidates Scott Walker, Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal wheeled through. “But campaign reporters are incentivized for speed and feeding the beast,” he said.

The reporters and editors Mr. Hamby spoke to for his 95-page report said that the Romney campaign’s decision to fence off its candidate and to staff its press effort with equally young people was a grievous tactical error. Because the staff on the bus or plane would not really confirm or deny anything, that left many idle hands that created much mischief. In an attempt to exercise total control over the message, the campaign lost all control in bits and pieces, so when things went wrong, as they did during Mr. Romney’s European visit, they went very, very wrong.

In his report, Mr. Hamby wrote that the growing role of so-called embeds, or television reporters attached to the campaign, had infuriated the Romney staff. Previously restricted to support roles for broadcast and cable news networks, the young journalists were suddenly weaponized by Twitter, their own blogs and video posts. In his report, Mr. Hamby calls the embeds “anthropomorphic satellite trucks.”

“If I had to pick three words to characterize the embeds, it would be young, inexperienced and angry,” an unnamed Romney adviser told Mr. Hamby.

Maggie Haberman, senior political reporter for Politico, told me, echoing remarks she had made to Mr. Hamby, that “the Romney campaign had a natural mistrust of the press, in part because he had seen his father savaged in the press decades ago.” She continued, “Beyond the mistrust, there was an outright hostility. They simply did not deal with reporters, and sometimes it was nasty, and I think they paid a price.”

And they often did so at a very high velocity. The death of the hallowed political reporter Jack Germond a few weeks ago served as a vivid reminder that the hallowed day story — a totemic representation of How It Was — has given way to a mosaic of posts on Twitter and blogs that form a running, constantly updated feed.

According to the report, the Obama campaign did a much better job of adapting to those realities than the Republican opponent. Rather than just waiting to see what bad tidings Twitter might bring, the campaign was often in the thick of things.

“A negative story or provocative Web video could fly from the desk of an Obama staffer to BuzzFeed and onto Twitter in a matter of minutes, generating precious clicks and shares along the way,” Mr. Hamby wrote in the report.

David Axelrod spent a fair amount of time as a senior adviser to the Obama campaign watching things blow up on Twitter and pushing back and promoting agendas there as well.

E-mail:carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

Advertising: An Old Campaign Learns a New Song

A BRAND once lovingly mocked for commercials proclaiming it as “the freshmaker” is refreshing its approach to marketing.

The brand is Mentos, sold by Perfetti Van Melle, which became famous — or notorious, depending on your perspective — for a series of commercials from the 1990s. The cheesy spots for the Mentos flagship product, chewy mints that come in rolls, were criticized and celebrated for their ham-handed selling style, straight from the 1950s; the corny Mentos slogan, “The freshmaker”; their hokey story lines, mostly centered on mix-ups and youthful mischief; and the silly Mentos jingle, with lyrics that seemed to have been written by someone for whom English was a second language (“It doesn’t matter what comes, fresh goes better in life”).

This week, Mentos is introducing a campaign for the chewy mint rolls that is meant to evoke the upbeat mood and cheerful tone of the original work while, executives hope, slicing off chunks of the cheese. The campaign is the first from a new creative agency for the Mentos brand, the New York office of McKinney, part of Cheil Worldwide, which is taking over from the Martin Agency in Richmond, Va., part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.

The centerpiece of the new campaign, which carries the theme “Roll with it,” is a commercial that is the return to American television advertising for Mentos. The spot is to run on cable channels that are watched by the target audience of teenagers and 20-somethings, which include the Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network, BET, Comedy Central, FX, MTV, the Nick at Nite block on Nickelodeon and VH1.

The new commercial, like its predecessors, features a fresh-faced, mint-mad youth who gives strangers the “thumbs-up” sign that symbolizes optimism — while also serving as a device to remind consumers they can use their thumbs to pop a Mentos chewy mint into their mouths.

This time, however, the oddball jingle is replaced with a song, written for the commercial by Beacon Street Studios, and the story line is less hokey: the youth skateboards past a colorful collection of characters at Venice Beach before falling, figuratively and literally, for a similarly fresh-faced young woman.

Another way the cheese quotient is reduced is that the 2013 spot is 15 seconds long, compared with 30 seconds for the original commercials.

Perfetti Van Melle plans to spend more than $30 million in the next 12 months to advertise Mentos brand products, which include new breath mints in addition to the chewy mints, as well as pellet gums like Mentos Pure Fresh. (A stick gum, Mentos UP2U, was introduced in 2011, but has been discontinued.) According to Kantar Media, a unit of WPP that tracks ad spending, Perfetti Van Melle spent $24.3 million last year to advertise Mentos products in major media, compared with $19.7 million in 2011 and $14.1 million in 2010.

The Mentos campaign is another example of a trend on Madison Avenue known as comfort marketing, which has gained popularity in the five years since the financial crisis of 2008. Advertisers are rummaging through their attics for vintage pitches, hoping that invoking fond memories of the past may help shoppers feel better about buying products now. And to counter perceptions that brands ladling out heaping helpings of nostalgia are too outdated, the ads are updated and refreshed for contemporary sensibilities.

“We wanted to do what was right for the brand today,” said Maurice Herrera, vice president and head of marketing for Mentos and Perfetti Van Melle USA.

“The freshmaker” generated “positive, quirky attributes” for the brand, he added, and it cast “a halo onto the brand, a positive one, that allowed us to go into gum.”

“But it also posed a challenge for the brand because it suggested the benefit was ‘We make things better,’ ” Mr. Herrera said, which was widely perceived as “an overpromise.”

Another challenge came when research among consumers in their teens and 20s showed that “more than half the millennials don’t associate ‘The freshmaker’ with the brand,” he added.

Replacing that theme with “Roll with it” speaks to the millennial generation’s “positivity,” Mr. Herrera said, and to “the point of view of the brand.”

Alex Van Gestel, managing director for McKinney New York, said the new campaign includes “some of the DNA from where the brand was in the past” including its “European sensibility,” reflecting how Mentos, and the original commercials, came from Europe.

“But as students of advertising, there’s also something new we want to create,” Mr. Van Gestel said, centered on “fun and youthful optimism,” adding: “You can’t over-intellectualize in this category. It’s a mint, a joyous experience.”

In another instance of comfort marketing, New World Pasta plans this week to start running a commercial, by Millennium Communications in Syosset, N.Y., that is based on a familiar spot from the 1960s and 1970s declaring Wednesday to be “Prince spaghetti day.” The new commercial will interweave material from the original with new material, bringing back Anthony Martignetti, who appeared at age 12 in the original spot, filmed in Boston by Venet Advertising.

Other agencies will also work on the new Mentos campaign, on tasks like print and digital ads and social media. They include Mongo Industries; R/GA, part of Interpublic; and TracyLocke, part of the Omnicom Group.

Court won't hear campaign contributions appeal

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court won't hear an appeal of a decision upholding a century-old ban on corporate campaign contributions in federal elections.

Media Decoder: Glenn Beck Begins Campaign to Urge TV Systems to Add His Web Channel

8:48 a.m. | Updated Glenn Beck is beginning a campaign to get his Internet channel, TheBlaze, onto cable and satellite television systems across the country, and the one system that already carries the channel, Dish Network, is backing him up.

The campaign will begin on Monday when Mr. Beck starts promoting GetTheBlaze.com, a Web site that asks fans to contact their television provider and request the channel. He will talk about the site on his nationally syndicated radio show and link to it on his social networking Web sites.

“You probably pay good money every month to your TV provider for access to channels like MSNBC and Al Jazeera America — channels that you might not watch, or even agree with,” Mr. Beck wrote in a letter on the Web site. “Adding TheBlaze will ensure that you and your family have a source of news and analysis that you can trust and that doesn’t betray your values.”

Mr. Beck has previously indicated that he plans to position the channel as a libertarian news and entertainment source, which would put it into relatively direct competition with Fox News Channel, where he hosted a hugely popular 5 p.m. talk show for nearly three years. The plan is rather audacious, partly because TheBlaze is owned by Mr. Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts, not by a media conglomerate like Fox’s parent, News Corporation.

Twenty months ago Mr. Beck left Fox and started GBTV, the subscriber-only Internet channel that he later renamed TheBlaze. Within a year he had 300,000 subscribers, no small feat for any Web site. But by then he’d also decided he wanted to get back on old-fashioned TV. In September 2012 Mr. Beck announced a carriage deal with Dish, the first of what his company hoped would be many such deals. Simply stated, the economics of television are better — TV channels get small per-subscriber fees, whether or not the subscribers ever watch, and the advertising possibilities are enormous.

Dish has a period of exclusivity with TheBlaze, so no other cable or satellite system can carry the channel quite yet. The companies haven’t disclosed how long this period lasts, but it is probably ending soon, because TheBlaze is starting its campaign now. Such campaigns are attempted all the time by small, independently-owned channels, often with little success. Ordinarily cable and satellite systems are reticent to carry new channels; in fact, the trend is in the other direction, toward dropping independent channels altogether.

But what Mr. Beck has — and what other small channel owners don’t have — is an audience of millions on the radio and on the Internet. And some help from the Dish Network. In a statement provided by a spokesman for the channel, Dave Shull, the Dish senior vice president of programming, said, “TheBlaze and Glenn Beck bring a unique perspective to Dish’s broad spectrum of political programming on all sides.” When the channel was added last fall, he said, “We had customers sign up quickly, and we saw new customers join Dish. In fact, subscriptions attributable to TheBlaze outpaced our projections by 80 percent, proving that Dish is giving customers what they want with a choice in programming, not to mention the technology to choose how to watch it.”

Even with Dish’s endorsement, it remains to be seen whether other cable and satellite systems — such as DirecTV, Comcast and Time Warner Cable — will agree to carry TheBlaze. They may simply point out that viewers can find it on the Internet.

An end to Web streaming was something Al Jazeera accepted when it bought Current TV in January for an estimated $500 million. (Mr. Beck said he tried to bid for the channel, but was rebuffed by Current’s co-founders, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt.) Al Jazeera currently streams its English-language news channel on the Internet free, but to make its cable and satellite distributors happy, it will stop doing so when it officially replaces Current this spring.

Then again, the Al Jazeera stream was free; the Internet stream of TheBlaze is only accessible to subscribers. Asked whether the channel would be taken off the Internet as a condition of gaining carriage on television, a spokesman said, “TheBlaze has no plans to do that at this time and believes that the continued success of the subscription platform proves to distributors the demand for our content.”

Along with the campaign announcement on Monday, TheBlaze said that Lynne Costantini, a former Time Warner Cable and Scripps Networks executive, was joining the channel as president of business development, to lead its effort to get on television.

The “Get TheBlaze” campaign will commence in phases and last for at least nine months. Mr. Beck wrote in his letter: “This journey for truth that we are on is much bigger than you and I; the future of liberty is hanging in the balance. All of us have a choice to make: sit on the sideline, or get involved.” He described TheBlaze not just as a family-friendly news and entertainment channel, but a cog in nationwide political change.

“If we succeed then we change the media. If we change the media, we control the debate. If we control the debate, we change politics. And if we change politics, we change the country,” he wrote.

TheBlaze has more than 40 hours of programming a week, including simulcasts of Mr. Beck’s radio show, a nightly show of his just for the channel, a nightly panel conversation about the news, and a couple of documentaries and reality shows. In January Mr. Beck described ambitious plans for the channel, involving more news reporting (“We are currently looking for our own Woodwards and Bernsteins,” he said) and a libertarian bent. “I consider myself a libertarian,” Mr. Beck said.

Advertising: Save the Children Uses OneRepublic in Child Mortality Campaign

Meant to gain financial and political support for the organization’s efforts to reduce child mortality, the campaign — called “Every Beat Matters” — was created by the New York office of the BBDO ad agency, part of the Omnicom Group, for Save the Children and the Advertising Council. OneRepublic’s song, called “Feel Again,” was released in August on iTunes and will be featured on the group’s album, “Native,” to be released in March.

The campaign is BBDO’s second for Save the Children, based in Westport, Conn., and the Ad Council; its first was introduced in 2010. Both campaigns were created to support the newborn and child survival efforts, primarily overseas, of Save the Children. According to Unicef data, about seven million children a year die before their fifth birthday, mostly from preventable and treatable causes like pneumonia, diarrhea and neonatal complications. Newborns account for 40 percent of those deaths.

David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America, said that when the agency began working with Save the Children, it decided to use the organization’s “unheralded” health workers to illustrate its aid efforts. The first campaign depicted actual workers in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, walking to work in rural villages and examining children.

The new campaign came about, Mr. Lubars said, when BBDO discovered a new type of stethoscope that lets the user listen to and record a patient’s heartbeat. It hired the documentary makers Sean and Andrea Fine, who have worked in Uganda and India, to film a local health worker, trained by Save the Children, in a rural village in Malawi.

The Fines’s 90-second television spot opens with the health worker, Chisomo Boxer, preparing for work and waiting on his bicycle on a dirt road. It then shows an airplane flying over rural Africa, carrying a box that is unloaded from the plane and delivered to Mr. Boxer. He enters the village, surrounded by children, and opens the box, which contains a special stethoscope. He uses it to listen to and record the children’s heartbeats and to assess their health.

The second half of the spot shows the Denver recording studio of OneRepublic. The group’s lead singer, Ryan Tedder, plugs a cable into the stethoscope, listens to the heartbeats of the children from Malawi and composes a song incorporating them. OneRepublic is then shown recording the song.

The ad concludes with Mr. Boxer riding his bicycle in Malawi with the stethoscope strapped to it, the village children running behind him. “Feel Again” is played, and a voice-over says: “This song was created with heartbeats of children in need. Find out how it can help front-line health workers bring hope to millions of children at EveryBeatMatters.org,” a Web site that BBDO created for the campaign.

BBDO also designed three print ads, each a “heartbeat portrait” of a different aid worker, one of whom is Mr. Boxer. Each portrait is made up of dozens of real electrocardiogram images; the name of each child whose electrocardiogram is shown is printed in tiny type to the left of the image.

The copy on Mr. Boxer’s ad says: “Actual heartbeats from the children Chisomo saved in Malawi created this portrait of him. Help front-line health workers like Chisomo bring hope to millions of children at EveryBeatMatters.org.”

The campaign also includes Web banners that employ Mr. Boxer’s “heartbeat portrait,” radio spots featuring Mr. Tedder, outdoor ads and Facebook and Twitter initiatives encouraging people to download OneRepublic’s song.

In addition, BBDO created an interactive kiosk that lets users plug their headphones into stethoscopes to listen to a child’s heartbeat, “Feel Again” and a message from Mr. Tedder. The kiosk was on display last month at the One Club in New York, and the Ad Council is arranging new sites for it this year.

Mr. Tedder said all the proceeds — both to the band and to its record label, Interscope — from the first 750,000 downloads of the song on iTunes would go to Save the Children. According to Peggy Conlon, president and chief executive of the Ad Council, the song has been downloaded more than 600,000 times so far.

Mr. Tedder, who has a young son, went to Guatemala after he wrote “Feel Again” to see firsthand how children lived there. “In many cases, the only thing that keeps these kids alive is these front-line health workers trained by Save the Children,” he said.

The campaign’s Web site was introduced in August, and the Ad Council began distributing its ads in September. “The goal of the campaign is to create awareness and raise money,” Mr. Lubars, the BBDO North America chairman, said. “We wanted to make it very personal, not negative, uplifting.”

Ms. Conlon said the intended audience for the campaign was “people who care about international childhood mortality, who are likely to be more involved with charitable work.” She added that it was the first time the Ad Council had relied heavily on the contributions of a pop music group in the creation of a campaign.

Mary Beth Powers, chief of Save the Children’s newborn and child survival campaign, said Mr. Tedder’s involvement “certainly brings new, younger audiences to the issue of child survival.”

She also said Save the Children hoped the new campaign would inspire Americans to tell elected officials that “they can’t balance the budget” — which has in the past contained financing for foreign aid programs — “on the backs of women and children globally.”

Nene Leakes For Gap Holiday 2012 Ad Campaign

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State's Ad Campaign For Voter ID Law Allowed to Proceed

The state's advertising campaign on the voter ID law can continue, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson decided less than a week before Election Day.

In Campaign Donations, DLA Piper Skews Toward Obama

Lawyers at the nation's biggest law firms are voting with their wallets - and President Obama is the clear winner.

Meg Whitman’s Toughest Campaign: Retooling Hewlett-Packard

IT’S not as easy being Meg Whitman as Meg Whitman might have expected.

At 56, Ms. Whitman, the eBay billionaire who spent a fortune unsuccessfully trying to become the governor of California, has found her Act III. She has been chief executive of Hewlett-Packard for a little more than a year, and many people are still waiting for her to get her message out about the place.

Here it is:

Meg Whitman believes in H.P., and believes that this company matters to Silicon Valley, to California, to the world. She believes that Wall Street doesn’t quite get it — doesn’t quite see the promise she sees. She believes that mobile devices, cloud computing and Big Data will re-energize H.P., a company that for a decade has grabbed more headlines for boardroom soap operas than for bold innovation.

“I believe in creative destruction,” Ms. Whitman says in a conference room near her executive cubicle.

Even, it seems, when the stakes include her company and reputation. In all likelihood, this is Ms. Whitman’s last great public performance. She became rich by building eBay, then spent more money than any candidate for public office in the nation’s history trying to become California’s governor. She was sometimes portrayed in that race as an aloof 1 percenter — as someone who pushed around subordinates, once literally, and who was unkind to her housekeeper, an illegal immigrant. “I left a little bruised,” Ms. Whitman, a Republican, says of the 2010 race she lost to Jerry Brown. “It was hard, it was personally very hard.”

So now Ms. Whitman is focusing her energy on H.P., the company founded by the tech legends William Hewlett and David Packard. Bill and Dave, as they are referred to at the company, spawned Silicon Valley. Last year, H.P. posted revenue of $127 billion. It employs 320,000 people directly, and easily that many again through a network of manufacturers and computer resellers across 170 countries.

Ms. Whitman has plenty of impressive-sounding stats at her fingertips. H.P., she says, employs thousands of people in Costa Rica, Houston and Boise, Idaho. “In India, we have 60,000 people,” she says. A new program for selling printer ink is in exactly 87 countries. Every 15 seconds, the company turns out 60 new printers, 30 personal computers and one powerful computer server. Still, she yearns for even more data, something closer to the command of the day-to-day process she had at eBay.

THE fact is, H.P. isn’t what it used to be. Next to Apple or Google, it looks like a bit of a loser. In the most recent quarter, as Apple soared to new heights, H.P.’s revenue fell 5 percent and its operating margins dwindled. Profit margins at I.B.M. and Apple are several times that of H.P. And H.P.’s share price, at just over $17 on Friday, is about where it was in 1995.

“It’s staggering,” says A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “This is now the cheapest big stock in the last 25 years. That reflects an industry belief that the company is going to decline.”

Ms. Whitman is impatient to move H.P. closer to a global computing explosion that is transforming the industry. Smartphones and tablets from Apple, Google and others are now flying into consumers’ hands worldwide. Those computers are tied via the Internet to cloud computing data centers operated by Amazon, Microsoft, and hundreds of multinational companies. Information from all the consumer devices, in addition to data from billions of sensors and Web-crawling robots, is crunched in these supercomputing clouds, creating a Big Data revolution full of business opportunities and dangers.

From Ms. Whitman’s high vantage, the trends of mobile, cloud and Big Data resolve into a single phenomenon: the creation and exploitation of Information Everywhere. H.P. makes consumer devices, in addition to servers for the cloud, sensor networks, and analysis software. Instead of standing at the confluence of the phenomenon, though, H.P. is on the sidelines, with most of the parts but none of the integration to make it a leader.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 30, 2012

An earlier version of the text of the slideshow accompanying this article referred imprecisely to the reasons that Carly Fiorina left Hewlett-Packard.  She was fired amid uneven business execution and not because of a corporate spying scandal. (The spying incidents came to light after she left.) The slideshow also referred imprecisely to the dismissal of Mark Hurd. He resigned amid charges of inappropriate conduct with a female contract employee, not an female employee of the company.

Advertising: Green Mountain Coffee Begins Fair Trade Campaign - Advertising

In recognition of October being Fair Trade Month, the brand is seeking to educate coffee drinkers about fair-trade certification, which many people may vaguely associate with worthiness without quite understanding it.

“I think about fair trade sometimes like antioxidants,” said Jonathan Yohannan, executive vice president for corporate responsibility at Cone Communications, one of several agencies working on the campaign, referring to substances often praised for their health benefits. “You know it’s good for you, but you don’t really know what it means.”

Green Mountain Coffee will help explain what fair trade means with a campaign called “Great coffee, good vibes, pass it on.” Print and online ads will direct consumers to the brand’s Facebook page, which will feature videos with the musicians Grace Potter and Michael Franti visiting certified coffee farms in Colombia and Sumatra.

“The videos are all about showing an authentic experience with fair trade, with the celebrities seeing firsthand the impact that fair trade has,” said Derek Archambault, senior brand manager for Green Mountain Coffee.

The brand works with the nonprofit Fair Trade USA, which certifies that producers conform to labor and environmental standards, and links farmers directly to companies rather than enriching middlemen.

When companies buy fair-trade coffee, they pay a community-development premium in addition to the base price. For every pound of conventionally grown coffee, the premium is 20 cents; for organically grown coffee, it is 50 cents, with 20 cents going to community development and the remaining 30 cents to farmers.

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In 2011, when more than 138 million pounds of certified coffee was imported to the United States, fair-trade premiums totaled about $17 million. The money went to cooperatives of farmers, who voted to apply it to development projects like new schools, health care facilities and equipment to improve the productivity of farms and the quality of their coffee.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters — the parent company, which also produces brands like Tully’s Coffee and, under a licensing agreement, Newman’s Own Organics — is the largest purchaser of fair-trade coffee in the world. It imported about 50.3 million pounds in 2011, or 24 percent of its raw coffee purchases, according to the company and Fair Trade USA.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters also owns Keurig, which makes systems that brew single-serve pods called K-Cups. Green Mountain spent $22.9 million on advertising in 2011, compared with $100.5 million for Starbucks, $37.5 million for Folgers and $24.9 million for Maxwell House, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP.

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One of the new online videos opens with Mr. Franti, the musician, who says, “I’m here in Sumatra teaming up with Green Mountain Coffee, where I’m going to learn about how fair trade makes a better cup of coffee and a better quality of life for farmers.”

In the video, a farmworker tells Mr. Franti that premiums from the fair-trade program enable him to send his children to school.

An on-site Green Mountain employee in the video adds that through such direct relationships with small farmers, the brand can help pinpoint the locations on a farm, like the side of a mountain with a certain amount of sun exposure, that yield the most drinkable coffee.

The videos with Mr. Franti and Ms. Potter — which are by Y&R New York, part of Young & Rubicam Group, owned by WPP — will be featured on Green Mountain’s Facebook page, which has more than 656,000 followers, and on YouTube.

Print ads for the campaign, also by Y&R, begin appearing Friday in publications like People, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. Digital ads will be introduced Monday on Web sites like YouTube, Hulu and Oprah.com.

Ms. Potter will perform live exclusively on the brand’s Facebook page on Oct. 9, and Mr. Franti on Oct. 24.

In 2011, Fair Trade USA helped farmers and farmworkers earn $22 million in premiums beyond the base price for their products.

While a wide range of products can receive fair-trade certification, including cocoa, nuts, wine and flowers, coffee is by far the most dominant. In 2011, the $17 million in coffee community-development premiums accounted for 77 percent of all premiums.

For Fair Trade Month, which the nonprofit organization is spearheading, other companies will also be promoting the cause. Whole Foods, for example, will hold sampling events with a range of certified products at more than 100 of its stores.

Mary Jo Cook, who calls herself the chief impact officer at Fair Trade USA, said she could recall no other marketing campaign devoted to fair-trade practices by a brand with the scope of the Green Mountain Coffee campaign.

“It’s a giant step in going out and engaging consumers so that they understand what fair trade is,” Ms. Cook said, adding that the campaign would have the effect of promoting fair-trade goods in categories besides coffee.

“We believe this will have a halo effect for fair trade as a movement, which is what we’re here to support,” she said.

Andrew Hetzel, founder of CafeMakers, which provides strategic planning and brand development for coffee businesses, said the coffee industry tended to focus more on social and environmental issues than other industries.

“You don’t see an Apple campaign for how well they treat workers in factories,” Mr. Hetzel said, referring to reports of poor working conditions at factories owned by some of the technology giant’s subcontractors. “But the coffee industry in particular seems to be especially sensitive to the environment and to workers.”