Doubts raised over Motorola, Apple AIDS charity campaign
$82m in the Red
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The enormous marketing assault mounted by companies involved in the celebrity-backed Red campaign against AIDS has raised questions over whether it is effort best spent.
According to Advertising Age, as much as $100m splurged on advertising Red products by Gap, Motorola and Apple has returned just $18m to the Global Fund.
The Global Fund's head of private sector partnerships Rajesh Anandan said: "Red has done as much as we could have hoped for in the short time it has been up and running. The launch cost of this kind of campaign is going to be hugely frontloaded. It's a very costly exercise."
The magazine reports the spend-to-give ratio has caught the eye of non-profit watchdogs. Charity Navigator president Terence Stamp said: "The Red campaign can be a good start or it can be a colossal waste of money, and it all depends on whether this edgy, innovative campaign inspires young people to be better citizens or just gives them an excuse to feel good about themselves while they buy an overpriced item they don't really need."
A group of San Francisco artists have taken issue with the consumer-friendly campaign and set up the site buylesscrap.org, which encourages people to give directly to the Global Fund, rather than accepting the "notion that shopping is a reasonable response to human suffering." ®
COMMENTS
Flash problem.
Looking at what they are doing, and having a background in this sort of thing (Web media). It seems they are trying to be flash (Just like the ReD campaine) but don't realy know what they are doing (Like the Red campaine).
Artists. They never seem to realise that Flash (and shockwave and...) is not just a animation tool. Idiots.
Even worse
I have the latest flash player and I can't view it, unless flash player 10 came out and I'm not aware of it? I am of course using Linux, I recon they've got some pretty mangled flash player detection, eg. If flash_player_version == 8: oops why not >= 8
I find it rather ironic...
not to mention irritting, that a site telling me to buy less crap is shoving the unmitigated crap that is Flash into my face, with no alternative... and then telling me to eff off as I don't have the latest version. Ten points for effort, minus ten for execution...

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