Katherine Dodds

Founder/ Creative Director of Hello Cool World

Katherine Dodds, AKA “Kat”, got her advertising chops with the anti-consumer magazine Adbusters, and learned to run a company by making the critically acclaimed documentary The Corporation an international grassroots and box office success —demonstrating a commitment to social outcome uncommon in the big bad ad world! Current projects see her taking on alternative “fair trade” distribution with the film 65_RedRoses, which follows the inspiring story of Eva Markvoort as she battles CF and waits on the transplant list for new lungs (65_RedRoses is soon to have it’s US launch on the Oprah Winfrey Network). She has also been the mastermind behind the first social media public health campaign of its kind with BC Cancer Agency — Live Aware. Create Empowerment: LACEcampaign.com  (around Pap testing), and has just developed a brand new campaign last month for ImmunizeBC of the BC Centre For Disease Control — IHaveImmunity.com

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Longer Bio

Media maker for over two decades, Katherine began her “advertising” career with the internationally renowned anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters where her PSA directorial debut was the stylish ad parody “Obsession Fetish” which took aim at Calvin Klein and gained worldwide attention, including being featured on Channel 4 News (UK) and the TV show Hard Copy (USA). An insider at CK HQ reported that Calvin himself had seen the spot saying, “the beast has been stung.” She is known for highly effective and slick campaigns in a range of media including film, video, print and web, all with a focus on using the power of branding to work on social issues and the potential of social media to engage audiences. In 2007 she received a “Woman of Vision” Award from Women in Film.

With the launch of her own agency in 2001, Katherine developed her own site, HelloCoolWorld.com, a campaign network that got its start with the Canadian block-buster doc “The Corporation.” Through this network HelloCoolWorld launched an online and has since launched a “fair trade” DVD distribution network for social cause projects and products. As the ‘official Canadian distributor” of the doc 65_RedRoses (recently chosen as part of Oprah’s Documentary Club) they are pioneering a model where profits can flow into campaigns, in this case the “#4Eva Live Life, Pass it On” campaign to promote organ donation and awareness around Cystic Fibrosis. When the film has its US premiere on OWN in the summer they hope to mobilize community screenings as fundraisers to drive the campaign as well as to create an ad campaign attached to the film to promote the #4Eva movement.

As an ad agency they have recently designed and launched on some ground-breaking government campaigns in BC. For example the LACE campaign, for the BC Cancer Agency’s Cervical Cancer Screening Program is the first time the agency has done such a social media campaign around public health advocacy. Now poised to go National and possibly even international LACE campaign embodies an approach to public health campaigning that is rooted in connection in both grassroots movement building, while also embodying the best of what good health governance and evidence based science has to offer.

This model is why Immunize BC (BC Centre For Disease Control) hired Hello Cool World to create an ad campaign representing the ‘modern family’ that engaged real people, develops a network of immunization advocates and brings their stories to life through photos, blogs, videos and ads. This campaign was a collaboration with Social Signal who designed the main ImmunizeBC  site, and also the campaign site we just launched a few weeks ago: www.IHaveImmunity.com.

A recent campaign HelloCoolWorld launched in honour of their 10 Year anniversary (and a decade of “putting sex in advertising where it belongs”) is the sex education site www.ThatsSoSexy.com. 

What all these projects have in common, is they are linked to the HelloCoolWorld database, which we maintain as an opt-in list, that allows people to sign up from different portals, to select the issues they are interested in hearing about, and allows us to build a bigger audience to promote all our projects, and gives every new project a built-in community to engage. At the same time, the data we gather, manage and maintain is separate from any confidential health information, allowing us a freedom to engage in volunteer-driven outreach while not compromising the privacy issues needed for more sensitive health data.

Through all the projects Katherine takes on, she is building a grassroots network so that Good Company/Hello Cool World can be of service to filmmakers, distributors, issue stakeholders and audiences. Join us at: www.HelloCoolWorld.com!

Katherine holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Victoria (Canada) and a Masters in Fine Art and Cultural Studies from the University of Leeds, UK.