NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Alex and Ana Bogusky are launching the “Million American Jobs Project,” a YouTube video that mashes animation with Econ 101 to prime people on the power of the pocketbook, and illustrates how buying a larger share of American-made goods can positively impact U.S. job numbers. The video is on YouTube and the millionjobsproject.us website, and is sent to a targeted audience of shoppers who prefer to buy American products.
“Consumers want to buy safe, ethically made, sustainable products and they struggle to figure out how,” believes Alex Bogusky, who hopes the video will transform consumer confidence into something more productive: consumer power. “You don't need an app or a rating system. It just hit me one day that the brand already exists and it's on every product by law. That brand is ‘Made in America.’ Oh, and guess what? It creates jobs, too.”
Bogusky is the former creative director/partner and co-chair of advertising agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. He was voted Adweek’s “Advertising Director of the Decade” in 2010, right before he left the agency. He has since founded FearLess Revolution with Ana, his wife, and takes on projects involving transparency, consumer rights and environmental issues. Over his career, he has created attention-grabbing marketing campaigns for brands such as Truth, Burger King, Mini Cooper, Microsoft and Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project. He also is an adviser and partner of Made Movement, the Americana-themed flash-sale site/marketing agency.
Sleeves rolled up, Alex narrates the three-and-a-half-minute video, which moves post-WWII-era utilitarian icons—cogs, workers, factories and consumer commodities like sneakers and big-screen TVs—along a conveyor belt to show and tell the story of how once-great America lost its competitive edge and fell into the Great Recession. Scott McDonald animated and art directed the “Million American Jobs” project.
It’s a slippery slope as U.S. manufacturing jobs are outsourced overseas, he explains, because unemployed factory workers don’t have money to spend at local businesses—the impact is felt by the town’s chefs, hair stylists and insurance agents. While economists initially theorize that America will reinvent itself as a nation of Information Age “engineers” and “designers” who ship menial jobs to Third-World countries (“We’ll just think of stuff!”), this prophecy doesn’t get fulfilled. R&D follows factories, apparently.
Then, the belt reverses: In an uplifting 180-degree turn, Bogusky broaches the topic of consumer power.
“We don’t have to wait for the politicians to fix this,” he says, as enthusiastic typefaces flash by and make way for positive pie charts that show how funneling one’s spending into the U.S. economy is an outsourcing antidote. Call-to-action: Everyone who sees the video is asked to share it with two people and pledge to buy 5% more U.S.-made products—about one more item than they do now—to make the million-job math work.
