Costly Red Campaign Reaps Meager Million

Bono & Co. Spend up to 0 Million on Marketing, Incur Watchdogs' Wrath

By Mya Frazier

Published: March 05, 2007

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

The collective marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola for the Red campaign has been enormous, with some estimates as high as 0 million.

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 million, or even 0 million.

Try again: The tally raised worldwide is million.

The disproportionate ratio between the marketing outlay and the money raised is drawing concern among nonprofit watchdogs, cause-marketing experts and even executives in the ad business. It threatens to spur a backlash, not just against the Red campaign -- which ambitiously set out to change the cause-marketing model by allowing partners to profit from charity -- but also for the brands involved.

Enormous outlay

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 0 million. Gap alone spent .8 million of its million outlay on Red during last year's fourth quarter, according to Nielsen Media Research's Nielsen Adviews.

But contributions don't seem to be living up to the hype. Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the recipient of money raised by Red, told The Boston Globe in December, "We may be over the 0 million mark by the end of Christmas."

Rajesh Anandan, the Global Fund's head of private-sector partnerships, said Mr. Feachem was misquoted, and defended the efforts by Red to increase the Global Fund's private-sector donations, which totaled just million from 2002 to 2005. (The U.S. Congress just approved a 4 million pledge to the Global Fund, on top of .9 billion already given and 0 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)

'Hugely frontloaded'

"Red has done as much as we could have hoped for in the short time it has been up and running," he said, adding: "The launch cost of this kind of campaign is going to be hugely frontloaded. It's a very costly exercise."

Julie Cordua, VP-marketing at Red and a former Motorola marketing exec and director-buzz marketing at Helio, said the outlay by the program's partners must be understood within the context of the campaign's goal: sustainability. "It's not a charity program of them writing a one-time check. It has to make good business sense for the company so the money will continue to flow to the Global Fund over time." She added that since many of Red's partners haven't closed their books yet on 2006, more funds likely will be added to the million.

But is the rise of philanthropic fashionistas decked out in Red T-shirts and iPods really the best way to save a child dying of AIDS in Africa?

Parody mocks Bono

The campaign's inherent appeal to conspicuous consumption has spurred a parody by a group of San Francisco designers and artists, who take issue with Bono's rallying cry. "Shopping is not a solution. Buy less. Give more," is the message at buylesscrap.org, which encourages people to give directly to the Global Fund.

"The Red campaign proposes consumption as the cure to the world's evils," said Ben Davis, creative director at Word Pictures Ideas, co-creator of the site. "Can't we just focus on the real solution -- giving money?"

Trent Stamp, president of Charity Navigator, which rates the spending practices of 5,000 nonprofits, said he's concerned about the campaign's impact on the next generation. "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."

Fears of nonprofits

Mark Rosenman, a longtime activist in the nonprofit sector and a public-service professor at the Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, said the disparity between the marketing outlay and the money raised by Red is illustrative of some of the biggest fears of nonprofits in the U.S.

"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."

http://boards.oprah.com/WebX?14@@.f12957b!skip=10&view=C

Check out how many people are speaking out against the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy.

Hundreds of dissident posts dominate the board!



_________



It think the dissident AIDS movement may only last a few more years.

Bad news?

Absolutely not! We are only dissenting when the majority view is that HIV causes immune suppression. With the mass revolution going on, our view will soon be the majority view.

Goodbye dissidents.....well, the few remaining Apologists my be the new dissidents in the future.

A FEW FACTS

1). The Bono RED Ribbon.

Costly Red Campaign Reaps Meager Million

Bono & Co. Spend up to 0 Million on Marketing, Incur Watchdogs' Wrath



2). Drugs company 'shill' 'AIDS' forums are dying like flies. The once mighty TheBody is almost dead, iVillage AIDS forum has closed, The About AIDS forum is dead, all 167 AIDS Meetup Groups have closed. The list goes on and on and on.

3). In contrast, Dissident web sites, video's, blogs, posts and forums are now so many that a grain of sand, in comparison, seems a rare commodity.



Put simply, we are winning a victory beyond our wildest dreams.

LET'S ALL WORK EVEN HARDER AND FINISH THE JOB!

Let the 'AID$' madness kill no more people with it's deadly drugs and lack of treatment for the World's REAL diseases.

The San Francisco Chronicle, 3/9/07, in an article entitled "SAN FRANCISCO

Chief of AIDS office to depart amid phaseout" by Sabin Russell, at

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/09/BAGRPOIBGI1.DTL&hw=AIDS&sn=001&sc=1000

states that

"San Francisco's Office of AIDS, long a symbol of the city's focused attention on the prevention and treatment of HIV, is being dismantled and its functions distributed throughout the Department of Public Health to cope with reduced federal funds and the ever-changing nature of the epidemic. "

"Jimmy Loyce, who has been director of the office for seven years, announced this week that he will step down from his 0,000-a-year post on May 1, and that no one will be named to replace him."

Can you imagine this racket made possible a job that swindled 0,000 a year out of the taxpayers for a lie? San Francisco has always had a high venereal disease rate until 1981 when suddenly it had a high "AIDS' rate. Then, when the questioning became serious in 1996, the "AIDS" rate suddenly declined and we now have a venereal disease problem again. The article further states:

"There are currently nearly 9,000 people in the city living with an AIDS diagnosis, and 6,400 living with HIV that has not progressed to AIDS."

There are 750,000 people in San Francisco, about 20% of whom are over age 60, a population that by definition is disease prone. 15,000 people who supposedly have "AIDS" or who are diagnosed "living with HIV" is about 2% of the population! This is not an epidemic; this is the usual medical problems of a small minority of the population! Considering one can have an Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), or simply, an immune deficiency, due to malnutrition, intravenous drug use (both legal and illegal), blood transfusions or old age, this is a miniscule sector of the population. For this immune deficiency, which is curable by definition, the taxpayers give the following:

"The office is responsible for about million in AIDS programs, much of them paid for by federal grants. Although catastrophic cuts in Ryan White Care Act funding have been averted, Loyce said the city expects to lose .5 million from built-in reductions in each of the next three years. At the same time, the number of people living with HIV in the city continues to grow, as drugs keep patients alive, and about 900 new infections are found each year."

Obviously, it cannot be growing, otherwise everyone in San Francisco would have "AIDS." The 2% cited earlier in the article does not coincide with the lie perpetrated later in the article about "900 new infections" per year.

Let us all remember that even the US government knows this "epidemic" is a lie when "AIDS" is not even among the 12 leading causes of death in the US; it is about 13th. The 15 leading causes are:

1. Heart disease, 685,000 annually

2. Cancer, 556,900 annually

3. Cerebrovascular disease, 157,000 annually

4. Chronic lower respiratory diseases, 126,000 annually

5. Accidents 109,000 annually

6. Diabetes 74,000 annually

7. The flu and pneumonia 65,000 annually

8 Alzheimer's disease, 63,000 annually

9. Kidney disease, 42,000 annually

10. Blood poisooning 34,000 annually

11. Suicide 31,000 annually

12. Liver disease, 27,000 annually

13. High blood pressure 21,000 annually

13a. "AIDS" 18,000 annually (but not listed as an official cause of death, and the definition of "AIDS" was changed in 1985, 1987, and 1993 and continues to vary from country to country, unlike any disease. TB is always TB around the world, etc. "AIDS" is not a disease; it is a condition of immune deficiency.)

14. Parkinson's disease 17,900

15. Homicide 17,700

It is a long way from 685,000 to 18,000 annually in a national population of 300 MILLION.

The Sunday, 3/11/07, San Francisco Chronicle, has an excellent opinion article by James Chin, "professor of epidemiology at UC Berkeley, is a former chief of the surveillance, forecasting and impact Assessment unit of the Global Program on AIDS of the World Health Organization. He is the author of "The AIDS Pandemic: the collision of epidemiology with political correctness" (Radcliffe, Oxford, 2007), " entitled "Myths and misconceptions of the AIDS pandemic" exposing lots of AIDS myths. He does not take on the Africa AIDS myth, which immune deficiency is caused mostly by malnutrition, followed by contaminated water, but he does a good job in a newspaper that on Sunday has 500,000 readers in the 5th most populated metropolitan center in the US, and the center of lots of AIDS charity rackets. See:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/11/EDGC7N6P7H1.DTL