by Harry Browne
I have yet to read a statement by either rock star that suggests a critique of power. They appear to believe that a consensus can be achieved between the powerful and the powerless, that they can assemble a great global chorus of rich and poor to sing from the same sheet. They do not seem to understand that, while the G8 maintains its grip on the instruments of global governance, a shared anthem of peace and love is about as meaningful as the old Coca-Cola ad. [Monbiot is presumably referring to the vaguely hippy ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing’ advertisement of 1971.]
… Bono and Geldof are … lending legitimacy to power. From the point of view of men like Bush and Blair, the deal is straightforward: we let these hairy people share a platform with us, we make a few cost-free gestures, and in return we receive their praise and capture their fans. The sanctity of our collaborators rubs off on us.103
It was significant that Bono’s man, DATA boss Jamie Drummond, saw fit to fight back, and slapped down the Left in the process. He wrote to the Guardian:
For too long a righteous handful on the left has felt it owned development policy, helping to perpetuate mainstream indifference and holding back the scale and ambition necessary to actually achieve the enormous goals of making poverty history. Bob and Bono are doing something far more significant and strategic: making these issues massive and mainstream so power must come to the people, not the other way round.104
Whatever Drummond meant by that last phrase – that the people must not come to power? – it was obvious that there would now be a sort of parting of the ways, in Britain at least, between Bono and traditional global-development activists. But there was something else that Bono and his crew had presumably noticed in the course of ‘making these issues massive and mainstream’: Make Poverty History had sold something like 15 million wristbands. That was a lot of people who were willing to wear their hearts just below their sleeves. And there was also the burgeoning corporate support they had enjoyed in the course of their campaigning – Live 8 sponsors included ‘Nestlé, accused by activists of exploiting the HIV/Aids epidemic in Africa to sell more milk substitute products to infected mothers; Rio Tinto, the world’s largest mining corporation, widely condemned for its longstanding record of human rights and environmental abuses across the global South; and Britain’s biggest arms manufacturer, BAE Systems’.105 All this pointed the way to a new(ish) model for conjoining commercial consumption with pseudo-activism.
SEEING (RED): SHOPPING AS ACTIVISM
How funny it was, after Drummond’s parting shot at the Left, that Bono’s new project, launched in 2006, conspicuously expropriated the colour red, both exploiting it and stripping it of its traditional political meaning. Mind you, Bono’s (RED)106 was and is primarily a phenomenon of the US, where red doesn’t always signify ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ – ‘red states’ are the ones that vote for the right-wing Republican Party. But since (RED) was co-founded by that scion of the Kennedys, Bobby Shriver, the Republican association can only be accidental. No, we must assume (RED) is simply the colour of alarm, a global stop sign, rather than an act of political appropriation.
(RED) is nothing more or less than a brand for sale, one that is licensed to a number of corporate ‘partners’ – initial ones were American Express, Apple, Emporio Armani, Converse, Gap and Motorola, and many others have come and gone – so they can stick it on a product or product range, with the promise that a part of the profits will go directly to the Global Fund, for the purpose of buying HIV drugs for Africans. It is a simple enough idea, and the Global Fund, while occasionally controversial, is certainly a reputable international body outside Bono’s control: it gets a large majority of its funding from governments, as well as a substantial wedge from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Still, what (RED) raises from its corporate partners and from direct contributions to the fund through its website – less than $200 million in total after six years, as of the Global Fund’s last published spreadsheet, downloaded in August 2012 – is small change in the context not only of the organisation it is funding (the (RED) money has comprised less than 0.8 per cent of the Global Fund’s income since 2001), but also of the multi-billion-dollar sums being tossed around in Bono’s previous lobbying work in Washington and points beyond. (It also pales in comparison to U2’s latest two-year tour gross of $736,137,344.107) Why has Bono expended so much time and effort, for so little return, in this particular piece of branding, and what does it signify?
To begin to understand it, perhaps it is worth noting where the idea allegedly originated. As Bono recalled in 2007, when it was still acceptable to refer in public to Bill Clinton’s now notorious deregulating treasury secretary, the guru of a Goldman Sachs generation, as ‘the great Robert Rubin’, he was the man.108 Rubin advised him in 2004 about his exertions for Africa, ‘You’ll never get this issue out there unless you market it like Nike.’109 Bono’s story doesn’t mention paying the great Rubin for this startling advice, and Bono presumably did not do so, though Rubin was, at the time, one of the world’s priciest, and (it turns out) worst, advisers: Rubin was hired out of the White House by Citigroup to advise its top executives in 1999; when he announced his resignation in January 2009, he had been paid $126 million in cash and stocks over the decade, and Citigroup had posted losses of $65 billion.110
Still, once Bono and Shriver took Rubin’s advice, what did marketing ‘it’ like Nike mean in practice? Basically, selling stuff coated with a thin layer of conscience, and perhaps a little guilt-relief, and taking some of the proceeds for AIDS in Africa. It’s easy to mock (RED) and its partners for offering up such classic slogans of cause-related marketing as ‘Desire and Virtue: Together at Last’, or ‘Be a Good-Looking Samaritan’, or ‘Smart Case, Smart Cause’ for a branded iPad cover. It is even easier to moralise about the ugly juxtapositions of extreme poverty and excessive consumption that lie just barely below the (RED) surface. For many people, the mere fact that someone can pay $200 for giant headphones – Beats, by Dr Dre – that not only shut out the noise of the world but also flaunt a tiny charitable donation (the promo-copy for the Beats explicitly names an amount: $5) is itself an obscenity, just another symptom of a brand-mad consumerist culture in a terribly sick world. But for many other people, pricy branded products are a pretty cool fact of life, and the idea that they signify something meaningful to the purchaser is a given, not even especially new: even hippies argued over Levis, Lee and Wrangler; African-American schoolyards were riven in the early 1970s by a division between Pro-Keds and Converse footwear factions that was as highly charged as the split between supporters of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
Surely, turning that sort of market power to work for the genuine good of people is something like the sort of ‘judo’ that Bono is prone to talk about, leveraging the strength of an opponent to defeat … something-or-other.
Maybe, but probably not. Again, the small good achieved by (RED) comes at a high price, in principle as well as in practice. One of the many dangers that may arise when social services of various sorts are privatised is that their operation becomes more immune to scrutiny, hidden behind obscuring layers that aren’t amenable to cleaning via freedom-of-information laws. As legal scholar Sarah Dadush has spelled out in great detail, (RED) is typical in this regard: words like ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ are thrown around in its promotional copy, but only in regard to the Global Fund, not to the operation of (RED) itself, which is a model of opacity.111 How much money from your purchase of a (RED) product goes to the Global Fund? They don’t have to tell you, though, as noted above with the Beats headphones, they sometimes do. How much money do the corporate partners pay (RED) to use the brand – money that, after all, they have to make somewhere, perhaps hidden in the price of products? They don’t tell you. What are (RED)’s own salaries and overheads? Nope, sorry, that’s not public information. How much money does each of the corporate partners pass on to the Global Fund? Erm, let’s see – there’s just a
total figure, with no breakdown by company (though Apple does claim to have chipped in more than a quarter of the total112). How does (RED) select partners? Are there criteria in terms of, say, labour practices (hello Gap and Nike), ecological sustainability, political or charitable profile? Or just a bidding war? Yes, you guessed it: that’s a secret too, though once a company is in there are guidelines and (RED) gets to vet any of a company’s (RED) ad copy. The website says up to half a company’s ‘profits’ on a particular product get donated, but who measures that, and what if a company says it didn’t make a profit on its (RED) line, however much of it got purchased? They don’t have to tell you any of that either, though (RED) told Dadush that its licensing agreements do stipulate a minimum donation.113 How much? Ah, that would be telling.
Legally speaking, (RED) is neither a charity nor a registered charitable fundraiser, but is instead the property of a limited-liability company called The Persuaders, registered in Delaware. (The small US state is the legal home to half the Fortune 500 because of its business-friendly legal, taxation and regulatory environment.) Contracts between The Persuaders and its corporate partners are entirely secret. The money the company takes in from its partners must be considerable, because Dadush could write in 2010, based on her research and a 2009 interview with its chief executive officer Susan Smith Ellis, that ‘[l]ittle information is available concerning Red’s overhead costs, other than that the organization has an estimated staff of twenty-two and has offices in New York and London … One would assume that staff members receive competitive salaries, as a number of them came from the marketing divisions of the Partners in the private sector.’114
With its first CEO being Shriver himself, and his successor from 2007 being the Madison Avenue marketing hotshot Ellis, this sort of size, status and accommodation suggests an annual budget of many millions of dollars. (Those London offices are in the premises of the city’s most politically connected PR agency, Freud Communications, so that ‘overhead’ may be paid in kind rather than cash.115) Bono has never been remunerated for his (RED) work, it seems.
Meanwhile, the Global Fund, despite being the (largest) beneficiary of (RED) and the alleged reason for its existence, apparently has no control over it. But it’s not complaining: as one analyst explains, ‘Red is a mechanism for the Fund to outsource a significant portion of its private-sector fundraising efforts.’116
But if (RED) is a small ‘win’ for the Global Fund, it is hard to imagine it as anything other than a big one for its participating partners. It is an undisputed fact that far more money is spent by the partners in advertising their (RED)-branded products than ever reaches anyone in Africa: the widely publicised 2007 analysis by Advertising Age magazine that estimated a $100 million (RED) marketing spend, compared to $18 million raised for the Global Fund, was never refuted in any detail by the campaign, though its huge disproportion is presumably partly a function of its reflecting the campaign’s first year and the publicity needs of any start-up.117 Given that any (RED) product effectively benefits from the advertising of all (RED) products, and from all the Bono-led generic marketing of the brand – the partners can apparently void the contracts if Bono ceases to be involved118 – they clearly get serious bang for their buck. The fact that much of this money flows into the coffers of media companies selling their advertising space can’t do any harm for the sort of press coverage (RED) gets.
For a marketing student, (RED) is probably quite exciting, a new thing, a transcendent brand that unites Apple mp3 players and Dell laptops, Converse shoes and Nike shoelaces – though never directly competing products: one thing we know about the agreements is that a company’s contract with (RED) buys it exclusivity against its competitors for the agreed product. But for anyone serious about global affairs, (RED) is clearly just another example of corporate-social-responsibility whitewashing ((RED)washing?), whereby not only do particular companies get injected with the purifying Bono medicine, but transnational consumer capitalism as a whole is furnished with conspicuous evidence of its vital role in making the world a better place, at a cost of peanuts.
Among other charities there is real concern that people who have been invited to tinker with their conspicuous consumption so that it benefits poor, sick people will reckon, when invited to make a direct donation to a charitable cause, that no, actually, they don’t have to, because they gave at the Gap. And Starbucks. And the Apple Store. And got a T-shirt, a mocha latte and an iPod Nano in the bargain. (Recall that Bono publicised (RED) by going on a televised shopping spree with Oprah Winfrey, who called him ‘the reigning king of hope’.) And so, increasingly, the practice of giving is sucked into the cash nexus of ‘philanthrocapitalism’.
Among the baldest statements of the benefits for the corporate partners, and for wealthy consumers, came from one of those nice people in the credit-card industry, where charitable partnerships are a growing practice. Laura Powers-Freeling, head of the UK consumer-card business for American Express, was interviewed by the Guardian, and she told how delighted she was (a ‘red carpet’ was mentioned, with no pun apparently intended) to meet Bono:
Powers-Freeling says the company, more often associated with power lunches than global poverty, had an immediate meeting of minds with the singer. ‘It was an interesting moment for us because one of the things we at American Express have been observing for a while is this trend towards what we now call the conscience consumer. The people saying, “I have to spend money anyway, so if there’s a way of using the power of my purse for good, great, but I don’t want to give up anything to do so.” ’119
Needless to say, she had an absurdly precise number for Britain’s ‘conscience consumers’, whose conscience extends to not giving anything up: 1.5 million, ‘expected to swell to 3.9 million within three years’. And Powers-Freeling told journalist Jane Martinson that she saw the Amex (RED) card as a means of growing her company’s business beyond the business-lunch market into that growing conscientious space:
To reach these people, Amex has decided to change the way it markets itself for its new scarlet-hued card. Although it has spent money on advertising in papers such as this one [the Guardian], it has eschewed more traditional means of launching new cards through direct mail and television advertising. Instead, it has used the association with rock stars and charities to spread the word, be it through the internet and blogs, or via other ‘viral’ marketing.
The involvement of U2’s lead singer is a key part of the company’s aim to be ‘cool and sexy’, terms not normally associated with a piece of plastic. More than a month after the launch of RED at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, the head of Amex UK is still singing the rock star’s praises. ‘Bono said this beautiful thing in Davos. He said that this card – he was holding it up – is not about what you have, it’s about who you are.’120
Researcher Nathan Farrell has written that Bono and (RED) are ‘part of a network of business interests … ideologically driven by a belief that market methods can provide solutions to problems such as the African AIDS epidemic’.121 This perhaps gives the ‘network’, summed up by that beautiful Bono moment at Davos, an unwarranted benefit of the doubt, in ascribing a genuine ‘belief’ to them collectively, rather than the sort of unbridled cynicism displayed above by Powers-Freeling, whom Farrell quotes. Nonetheless, Farrell argues powerfully and persuasively that ‘the (RED) campaign has sought to construct AIDS in a manner consistent with the ideological views with which it is underpinned’ – that is, as a problem to be solved by the depoliticised application of Western cash.122 Its mission is presented as a simple and unproblematic moral imperative to assist an undifferentiated continent, while research suggests its shoppers have only the vaguest idea of the ‘good cause’ they’re supporting.123
In addition, as a corporate marketing campaign, (RED) must generally avoid being the bearer of bad news. Thus, in 2012, its website (joinred.com) highlighted the decline in the number of babies born HIV-positive – ‘F
ighting for an AIDS-free generation’, those innocents beloved of the Christian Right – but not the continuing increase in the number of people who have been diagnosed with the disease.
As Lisa Ann Ponte and Stefano Richey point out, (RED) markets itself not with the usual images of passive African sufferers – though it might be argued that they are implied, being so embedded in Western consciousness – but by avoiding them in favour of sexy Western consumers. Occasionally, a happy African appears, as in the famous Amex (RED)-card advertisement in which supermodel Gisele Bundchen reaches behind her to sort-of embrace (without looking at him) Masai warrior Keseme Ole Parsapaet; more often Africa is sexily suggested, a streak of face paint on Gwyneth Paltrow’s white cheek. Bono himself, fashionable, brand-conscious, is part of the visual project:
AIDS provides the quintessential cause as the outlet for RED’s hard commerce approach to doing good, because – like fashion, rock music, or celebrity – it is about money, power and sex.
While modern philanthropists have morphed into postmodern consumers, the stationary supporting cast is dragged back onto the development stage to justify this newest version of assistance, the ‘rock man’s burden’ …
… RED takes a new twist in which sexuality is being reclaimed by the West as healthy. Bono provides the healthy and sexy body to contrast with the ‘African woman dying from sex’ body. In the role of the totemic celebrity, he redeems sex, while reclaiming masculinity, and restoring a social hierarchy where cool, rich, white men save poor, voiceless African women and children. All of this is managed within a discourse of concern, care and ethics … The complex scripts of race, gender and global economic inequality are ignored with justifications that ‘AIDS is an emergency’ and thus normal rules do not apply. At the same time the ‘normality’ of consumption, and the social and environmental relations of trade and production that underpin poverty, inequality and disease, are not questioned.124