Apple, Motorola in the RED?

High expense and low returns bring attention to RED's new philanthropic model.

By Danielle Lee

The RED campaign, launched last year with the fanfare of celebrity endorsement and the involvement of Apple, Motorola and Gap to benefit the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, has come under attack following an AdAge article reporting that the involved companies spent $100 million on marketing and have raised only $18 million worldwide. The figures have drawn criticism from nonprofit and consumer watchdogs, along with a response from RED CEO Bobby Shriver.

Defending RED as a “new fundraising model” in his letter to AdAge Editor Jonah Bloom, Shriver wrote, “this marketing would have been spent anyway, on other product lines. It never would have been (nor will it ever be) given to the Global Fund. We were able to divert existing marketing dollars for RED.”

The RED campaign, created by Shriver, Chairman of Debt AIDS Trade Africa (DATA) and Bono, built partnerships with several companies to produce branded products and donates a percentage of those product sales to the Global Fund. While Shriver and executives at the Global Fund have defended the promotion as raising a valuable level of awareness in addition to “five times the amount given to the Global Fund by the private sector in four years,” some critics bemoan the focus on consumption—and the high price of it—as a method of charity.

Mya Frazier, writer of the AdAge article, wrote, “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.”