Amongst the bottles of shampoo, bubbly beverages, bars of chocolate, packs of rack of lamb that I have worked to design and market, I never imagined I’d be asked to promote this: Nothing.

Having joined Nail earlier this year, Nothing was introduced to me casually across the conference room table during my interview. As in, “If you worked here, you’d be managing this” – a can of Nothing and a multi-media campaign around it. My heart leapt with joy. Eyes opened wide. Jaw dropped. Love at first sight. And all those other cliches of surprise and delight.

Nothing is an empty can. It’s also an unexpected way to achieve the objective set out to us by the Rhode Island Community Food Bank – to engage a younger audience and drive online donations. You might think that an assignment whose purpose was to drive on-line traffic would result in a hyper “Web 3.0″ approach centered around viral, geo-located, mobile, augmented-reality gaming or whatever the latest trendy web trend is. But it’s not. And it’s certainly not the typical guilt-them-into-a-donation with needy-kid imagery approach.

Instead, the heart of this campaign is entirely analog. A can. 19th century technology. Its profundity is that it gets you at the moment you are connecting with the sources of your own meals. This is a brand of non-food, sitting right next to the iced coffee server and the green beans.

Every can purchased puts ten pounds of nourishing food on your neighbors’ plates. Which makes this can more than a can. It’s an opportunity to do something. Proceeds support the Rhode Island Food Bank, so for now: Nothing is only available throughout our home state. Any marketeer who knows how hard it is to get shelf space for new products – even for existing national brands – will appreciate the efforts it took to get 130 retail locations throughout Rhode Island to participate. I half expect to find it on eBay any minute now.

In the TV commercials, people who think they are participating in a taste-test are confronted with an empty plate. The first time I saw the rough edits I made the mistake of watching 14 or so in a row. Although it was emotionally overwhelming to see so many people’s empathetic and teary responses, it also made me really happy. It made me happy to think that there were so many people willing to bring this idea to life, and it made me really happy to be working at an agency that’s willing to apply its creative and business skills for the common good.