March 21, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
All the recent criticism of the Project (RED) campaign
has prompted Paul Jones, a marketing consultant, to urge nonprofit groups and businesses to disclose more information to potential supporters.
Mr. Jones, author of the blog Cause-Related Marketing, writes that marketers need to listen to critics of Project (RED).
Several articles have said that the campaign has spent $100-million in promotions while producing about $18-million for charity, although organizers of Project (RED) have said those figures are not accurate.
“We need to do a better job of being transparent,” he writes in his blog. “We have to banish from our language the phrase ‘a portion of the proceeds,’ or any of the myriad and equivocal variations.”
Mr. Jones says that unless charities and corporate sponsors become much clearer in how they explain their marketing arrangements to the public, they could soon be facing an “anti-cause-marketing tipping point.”
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