MWPRInsight: Potential Crisis Situation (PR is needed)

Bottom Line for (Red)
New York Times

By RON NIXON
Published: February 6, 2008

KIGALI, Rwanda — A year ago, staff members at the Treatment and Research AIDS Center could barely cope. Patients, unable to find care elsewhere, flowed in from every corner of the country. And if one of them was fortunate enough to find a bed here, she often had to share it.

Today, a dozen patients, mostly women, sit in neat waiting rooms, laughing and talking as children play around them. Doctors greet one another as they make their rounds, and take all the time they need to explain the complicated schedule H.I.V. drugs require.

According to the center’s managing director, Dr. Anita Asiimwe, doctors spend less time on crises and more time researching how to slow H.I.V. transmission in this tiny African nation, still recovering from a genocide in 1994.

Dr. Asiimwe thanks an unlikely benefactor for all these improvements: the American shopper.
Just over a year ago, the rock star Bono started Red, a campaign that combined consumerism and altruism. Since then, consumers have generated more than $22 million to fight H.I.V. and AIDS in Rwanda by buying iPods, T-shirts, watches, cologne and most recently — as anyone who watched the Super Bowl knows — laptops, with all of them branded “(Product)RED.”

According to Rwandan officials, Red contributions have built 33 testing and treatment centers, supplied medicine for more than 6,000 women to keep them from transmitting H.I.V. to their babies, and financed counseling and testing for thousands more patients.

Yet detractors say Red has fallen short. They criticize a lack of transparency at the company and its partners over how much they make from Red products, and whether they spend more money on Africa or advertising.

“Look at all the promotions they’ve put out,” said Inger L. Stole, a communications professor at the University of Illinois. “The ads seem to be more about promoting the companies and how good they are than the issue of AIDS.”

In the Super Bowl ad Sunday, which promoted Dell’s recent Red debut, a man buys a Red laptop and finds himself cheered in the street by strangers and kissed by a beautiful woman. At the end of the commercial, three screens flash in rapid succession: “Buy Dell. Join (RED). Save Lives.”

Read entire article http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/business/06red.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ei=5088&en=827c3f68422f1658&ex=1360040400&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss