From: "Rich Gauszka" 

 Spend $100 million to raise $18 million?

 http://adage.com/article?article_id=115287&rf=23m


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.

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.

The collective marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola for the Red
campaign has been enormous, with some estimates as high as $100 million.

 "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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