Brain stuck at work

Yesterday I wrote my inaugural article for work about Product Red, a group brand being launched through AMEX, The Gap, Nike's Converse, and Giorgio Armani. The three clothiers are going to market product lines, some made with African materials or labour, whose revenues will go in part to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. AMEX is launching a Red Card (oh, AMEX, you so funny!) in the United Kingdom. One percent of every purchase made with the card will go to that same fund. Now there's some talk of Apple issuing a Product Red iPod. Yesterday I wrote about it in terms of branding and marketing, but I still feel a little rant inside . . .

I'm not sure how seriously the idea is being taken, since the clothiers haven't universally disclosed the exact slice of the revenue from the Product Red lines that will go to the Fund. In my exhaustive hour of research, the idea was getting the most flack in the right wing press (that is, the National Post), which is silly. It's an excellent marketing idea and a neat intersection of corporate irresponsibility and consumer conscience - the invisible hand of capitalism visibly at work, really.

You know, sometimes I wonder, in the eternal struggle between Left and Right, if the winner might be the side that doesn't contrary itself out of existence . . . oppse things because they sound righty or lefty, and not out of a real conviction they're good or bad.

People is dumb.

Anyways, invisible hand, capitalism, yeah. I, for example, only shop at the Gap under extreme duress because I find their shit boring and I've still got a bad taste in my mouth from all the sweatshop reporting. But if I need some t-shirts and I have a choice between something made in a sweatshop from H&M (a store that only came to Canada after people stopped bothering to make a deal about sweatshops in the media, so I don't have negative emotional associations with it) and something made in a sweatshop from the Gap that will offer some small benefit to Africa, I reckon I'd go to the Gap. So there you are. I reckon I'd get the card too. Half the country is already paying stupid interest rates for cards with features they don't really understand how to use (or is that just me again? Fucking Air Miles. What the fuck?). For the companies involved in the brand it's excellent marketing, and for consumers a way to feel nice without having to think about their giving strategy too hard.

The other reason it was silly that the right-wing press was laying into it so is that Bono (yeah, I know, he fucking bugs me too with his girl voice and snowboarder sunglasses - don't you wish Johnny Cash had lived long enough to re-record the whole U2 library? I might actually listen to it then. Not to mention he calls everything 'sexy'. NOT EVERYTHING IS SEXY, BONO, THINK OF A NEW FUCKING ADJECTIVE, FUCK), the 'face' of the brand, basically issued an invitation at the Davos summit for any corporation to jump on the Product Red bandwagon. He even said out loud he expected a few naughty companies to get in on the action and embarrass the fund a bit. This is free marketeering, for heaven's sake - even the face of the Product is open about how corporate participation in the brand is for the sweet press that'd result, not about being nice or going to heaven or something.

Yeah, so, I think it's a great idea. Even though Bono called it sexy. It's not sexy, fuck. Vincent Cassel is sexy. Monica Bellucci (see above) is sexy. Product Red is a fucking brand. Sexy. What the fuck. Anyways, there'll never be such a thing as a corporate conscience because it isn't in people's natures to have a collective conscience. The only way to make corporations nice is to ensure they appeal to individual consumer consciences, and this seems like a cute way of doing it. I hope it catches on, and that it's transparent enough for people to trust.