Tag Archives: bono

The Role of the Celebrity Activist

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Aaron Burr vs. Alexander Hamilton.  Nas vs. Jay-Z.  And now, Easterly vs. Bono.  In an attack reminiscent of Jon Stewart’s epic takedown of the sheepish Jim Cramer after the financial crisis, Bill Easterly, a well-known development economist who favors bottom-up approaches to development rather than top-down technocratic solutions, uses the 30-year anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon to lament the decline of good celebrity activism.  Summing up the comparison in a sentence, Easterly pens:

Lennon was a rebel. Bono is not.

Bono is an interesting character.    I am not completely sold that he is not a completely negative force in terms of development, but I do think that he has the tendency to do more harm than good.  First, he aligns himself with a particular school of thought regarding how foreign aid should be delivered.  Then again, I do the same thing (the opposite school of Bono), so I don’t know if I can completely knock him for standing behind what he believes, even if I think he is wrong.  Second, he provides a public face for institutions and organizations that are often disingenuous when it comes to impact, as I have written about in this post about Project (Red) and the trend of cause marketing.  But Easterly sums up my thoughts nicely in his post.  Here, Easterly describes what he sees as the problem of celebrity activism in general:

Bono is not the only well-intentioned celebrity wonk of our age – the impulse is ubiquitous. Angelina Jolie, for instance, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (seriously) in addition to serving as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. Ben Affleck has become an expert on the war in Congo. George Clooney has Sudan covered, while Leonardo DiCaprio hobnobs with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders at a summit to protect tigers; both actors have written opinion essays on those subjects in these pages, further solidifying their expert bona fides.

But why should we pay attention to Bono’s or Jolie’s expertise on Africa, any more than we would ask them for guidance on the proper monetary policy for the Federal Reserve?

I agree.  Raising awareness is important, and I like to see celebrities shining a light on critical issues.  I understand the desire and sense of need to use your celebrity for good, but, just like I don’t want to see Bill Easterly dance, I don’t want to hear Bono be a technocrat or an economist.  This, according to Easterly, is the role of a true celebrity dissident:

True dissidents – celebrity or not – play a vital role in democracy. But the celebrity desire to gain political power and social approval breeds intellectual conformity, precisely the opposite of what we need to achieve real changes. Politicians, intellectuals and the public can fall prey to groupthink (We must invade Vietnam to keep the dominoes from falling!) and need dissidents to shake them out of it.

True dissidents claim no expertise; they offer no 10-point plans to fix a problem. They are most effective when they simply assert that the status quo is morally wrong. Of course, they need to be noticed to have an impact, hence the historical role of dissidents such as Lennon who can use their celebrity to be heard.

We need more high-profile dissidents to challenge mainstream power. This makes it all the sadder that Bono and many other celebrities only reinforce this power in their capacity as faux experts. Where have all the celebrity dissidents gone? It’s not a complicated task. All Lennon was saying was to give peace a chance.

Amen.  Keep it simple.

Product (RED) and the Dishonesty of Cause Marketing

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There is a good blog post on Aidwatch, Big Willy Easterly’s cynical aid-takedown machine, about the role of celebrities in promoting development and their relative benefits.  This post is just Bill being Bill, railing against the status quo.  In this post, two guest bloggers, Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte, who have just authored a book about the topic, titled Brand Aid, discuss the problem of “cause marketing”:

In the book, we examine what happens when aid celebrities unite with branded products and a cause. The resulting combination—what we call “Brand Aid”—is aid to brands because it helps sell products and builds the ethical profile of a brand. It is also a re-branding of aid as efficient and innovative, based on “commerce, not philanthropy.”

In the case study of Product (RED), a co-branding initiative launched in 2006 by Bono, we show how celebrities are trusted to guarantee that products are “good.” Iconic brands such as Apple, Emporio Armani, Starbucks and Hallmark donate a proportion of profits from the sale of RED products to The Global Fund to finance HIV/AIDS treatment in Africa. In essence, aid celebrities are asking consumers to “do good” by buying iconic brands to help “distant others” —Africans affected by AIDS. This is very different from “helping Africa” by buying products actually made by Africans, in Africa, or by choosing products that claim to have been made under better social, labour and environmental conditions of production.

In Product (RED), celebrities are moving attention away from “conscious consumption” (based on product information) and towards “compassionate consumption” (based on emotional appeal). To us, this is even more problematic than the risk of negative media attention that celebrities bring to development aid.

This reminded me of an article in the New York Times from 2008 about Project (RED), which revealed this tidbit of information about the project:

In its March 2007 issue, Advertising Age magazine reported that Red companies had collectively spent as much as $100 million in advertising and raised only $18 million. Officials of the campaign said then that the companies had spent $50 million on advertising and that the amount raised was $25 million. Advertising Age stood by its article.

I remember not being so surprised when I read this, but still a little ticked off.  My take on corporate social responsibility is that it can often be disingenuous, dishonest, or, as worst, deliberately misleading.  I like the idea of money in development that is not politically-motivated, which is also, frequently, dishonest and disingenuous.  I also like the idea of profit-oriented businesses with not much tolerance for wasting money allocating resources to some of these causes.  But I think it masks some of the real problems, which are systemic and global, and provides a cover for the perpetrators of those problems.  “Cause branding” is a relatively low-cost and easy investment for a business to make, without actually having to produce the results it needs.  For Starbucks, a $100 million campaign is pocket change, and to raise only $18 million to the Global Fund – an organization that has been recently skewered in the press for corruption and waste – is a travesty.  (My intention is not to villify the Global Fund, which has seen much of its funding put on hold because $34 million, or 0.3% of the total, was potentially lost due to corruption – which is pretty damn good considering the track record of other projects). Continue reading →