Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been inspired by Jamie Oliver and his ambitious campaign that I first discovered through his TED Talk. Every year TED awards one person the TED prize of $100,000 and “One Wish to Change the World” – which is basically the tools and connections that a conference like TED can provide. Jamie Oliver’s wish as quoted on the conference page reads “I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.” Jamie’s talk inspires for a few reasons. First you are blindsided by some serious statistics about obesity. Then you realize just how passionate he is about trying to fix the problem. The talk is quite moving and if you haven’t seen it, I recommend you take a look.

The campaign begins. In January, Jamie joined Twitter and started getting the word out. Now he’s trying to get one million people to sign an online petition that he plans on taking to the White House to present to the President. The word is out, the Tweets are being retweeted, the Facebook page points to the petition and his site which has everything you’d need to know about Jamie’s Food Revolution.

I also enjoyed this Mashable interview by Brenna Ehrlich where Jamie explains exactly what the food revolution is. Interviews like this just go to show how much of an effort the guy really is putting into his campaign.

I don’t have kids but some day I hope to, and when I do I’d like them to be served good food by the school system. I could write a whole post about the importance of eating healthy food, and how feeding kids properly not only benefits them, but all of us. Instead I’d like to support the movement by signing the petition and posting this for all of you to read in hopes that you’ll do the same.

There are so many reasons why this ad campaign by American Apparel works so well. Ok, really there are two reasons. Reason number one, lots of butts. Boy butts, girl butts, everyone’s butts. Second reason, voting and ranking. Not only do you get to click through the photos, you get to vote 1 – 5 on the quality of butt. One can only assume (pun intended) that this could become addicting. In addition to the addictiveness of ranking peoples butts – you have the opportunity to share butts on Twitter and Facebook. Twitter offering a link back to the voting page so your Twitter followers can start voting, and Facebook leaves a post on your wall so all your friends can see a butt that you particularly liked. (Insert Butt-Facebook joke here.)

Why would you put a picture of your butt up on the American Apparel site you may ask. For $300 – duh! Plus, you can put that on your resume!

What really blew my mind was how I came to find this campaign. Someone I follow on Tumblr took a screen shot of the campaign, just like I have above. But (no pun intended) nowhere on that photo does it say American Apparel. This means that their ad campaigns are strong enough that just from their imagery and type of underwear, I was able to guess that this was coming from them. I went straight to their site, and there it was. Crazy.

Hurry up and post a photo of your butt – don’t lose this chance to have your butt seen by thousands of people and win $300 in the process!

Please link your photo in the comments section (or don’t – ewwwwww).