Not good news for Bono and Product(RED):
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AdAge.com) — It’s been a year since the first Red T-shirts hit Gap shelves in London, and a parade of celebrity-splashed events has followed: Steven Spielberg smiling down from billboards in San Francisco; Christy Turlington striking a yoga pose in a New Yorker ad; Bono cruising Chicago’s Michigan Avenue with Oprah Winfrey, eagerly snapping up Red products; Chris Rock appearing in Motorola TV spots (“Use Red, nobody’s dead”); and the Red room at the Grammy Awards. 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.
Ouch! $18 million?? You have to wonder what in the hell is going on with that, especially considering the absolute overflow of ads, marketing, not to mention the backing of enormous companies like Amex, Motorola, and Apple. Considering the chatter over the campaign, it’s really weird that it has translated into so little.
Mark Rosenman sums it up up thusly (and accurately, I might add):
“There is a broadening concern that business is taking on the patina of philanthropy and crowding out philanthropic activity and even substituting for it,” he said. “It benefits the for-profit partners much more than the charitable causes.”
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