Remember that whole Product Red thing? No? Allow me and my good friends at Wikipedia to refresh your memory.
Product Red, styled as (PRODUCT)RED, is a brand licensed to partner companies such as American Express, Apple Inc., Converse, Motorola, Gap, Emporio Armani, Hallmark, Microsoft, and Dell. It is an initiative begun by U2’s frontman, Bono, and Bobby Shriver of DATA to raise money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Bobby Shriver has been announced as the CEO of Product Red, whilst Bono is currently an active public spokesperson for the brand.
So that would give the impression that they’d be raising a whole heap of money for those starving brown children, right? Well, they’re certainly ready to spend the money on making sure that you know that they’d love to help those starving brown children!
Allow those at AdvertisingAge to warm the cockles of your heart.
By any measure, the buzz has been extraordinary and the collective marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola has been enormous, with some estimates as high as $100 million. Gap alone spent $7.8 million of its $58 million outlay on Red during last year’s fourth quarter, according to Nielsen Media Research’s Nielsen Adviews.
So how much money has all this spending on advertising managed to net for the people who actually need it? Yeah. Not so much.
So you’d expect the money raised to be, well, big, right? Maybe $50 million, or even $100 million.
Try again: The tally raised worldwide is $18 million.
Apparently you people aren’t buying enough iPods to save the world.
I suggest investigating BuyLessCrap.org. They have this crazy notion that rather than but something you don’t need so that they can give a sliver of the profits as a donation, you might be helping more by, oh, I don’t know… donating.
Join us in rejecting the ti(red) notion that shopping is a reasonable response to human suffering.
We invite you to donate directly to the (RED) campaign’s beneficary The Global Fund and to… other charitable causes… without consuming.
Say… that’s just crazy enough to work!
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3 comments ↓
As though I can afford to pay $54 for a lousy, thin, won’t-begin-to-keep-me-warm-in-Minnesota t-shirt anyway! All, ultimately, to stroke the over stroked ego of this sniveling little bastard. I’m going to go for now. Redirect my energy elsewhere, but I’ll be back when I need to be. Thanks for existing “ihatebono.com”.
Bollocks to Bono. The man is a sanctimonious little turd. He should stick to what he does best - making very bad stadium rock.
He’s a prime candidate for Hustler’s Arsehole of the Month, if this man could make himself look like a bigger sell out I don’t know how. Bono is everything wrong with music presently, Viva Jello Biafra!
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