BUSINESS ETHICS
As of late there’s been an abundance of charitable campaigns on Twitter. This isn’t the seasonal call for money you get from your local non-profits or charities. Instead, companies are posting graphics with their company logo and details of the charity they themselves are wanting to support. They propose to offer the charity funds proportional to the volume of retweets they get. “We will donate $1 for every re-tweet (up to one million dollars.)”, they write.
This may seem entirely innocuous to some but it has my ethics muscle twinging and feels a bit over-the-top, a bit exploitative even. Let us walk through what’s happening here.
So, you’re a huge global corporation and your CFO has allocated some money, $1 million – squeezing it in now, before the end of year, so that you can benefit from a nice tax write-off for the 2014 fiscal year. You’ve sent off a memo to your marketing and public relations team to see what if they can brainstorm a way to make this money go even further. They discuss how the funds should go toward a very visible global charity, something unambiguously wholesome and non-controversial. Doing so will mean that along with the tax write-off the company can exploit the donation in nearly endless variety of ways through the media, on internal company communications, and in quarterly and annual reporting. You’ll be able to frame the tax credit (a financial benefit to yourself, one that you wouldn’t entertain otherwise) as evidence of you being “socially responsible” and a “good corporate citizen.” You’ll paint a picture of the corporation having essentially granted these funds out of the goodness of your multinational corporate heart, a gift you really couldn’t help but make having seen the amazing work of the chosen charity.
But that’s just the beginning: that’s just business as usual. This year the temp guy in marketing (Jasper, a bit of a know-it-all hipster from Brooklyn who’s hoping this unpaid internship will land him a real job some day) has come up with something really brilliant. This year, instead of a massive tax write-off and a year’s worth of spin, you’re also going to get the public to pull off a global advertising campaign for the company. And, what’s more, we’re going to get them to do it for free.
Last year, before Jasper signed on, your marketing gurus decided the company would spend some big money, more than they’ve ever splurged on a single effort, to have a Hollywood film crew produce a thirty second spot to air during the Super Bowl. When they crunched the numbers the $10 million investment ($4 million for production and $6 million to release on prime time television) to reach an audience of around 100 million seemed like and incredible deal. (Last year’s Super Bowl just happened to be the most watched television in U.S. history, netting 110 million viewers... Of course the marketing team and all of senior management were thrilled and spent months patting one another on the back.)
This year Jasper has promised to single-handedly, over his lunch hour, combine their charitable donation with their marketing strategy; reach twice as many viewers as last year’s flashy spending spree; do so without making the company look like it’s trying to “sell” the public anything; and (here’s the kicker) do so at zero cost to the corporation.
Jasper has a very basic grasp of elementary math, a rudimentary understanding of the internet, and is able to edit and upload the company logo to Twitter (unlike any of his older colleagues.) Jasper read somewhere that the average Twitter user has close to 200 followers. (He also knows that many celebrities, politicians, and public intellectuals have themselves a million or more followers.) This means that if he delivers a message saying that the corporation will donate a dollar for every retweet, up to a million dollars (money they were already going to give anyway), the public will run with it and do all their work for them.
Jasper will have got the brand out there in a very positive light, associating the company with this fantastic charity, put the company logo in front of the eyes of at least 200 million people (but quite possibly 500 million or a billion), and done so in a way that doesn’t look like the company is even marketing or trying to get anyone to buy anything. And, moreover, what is essentially an ad for your corporation and the charity, will arrive to most people as a personal endorsement from one of their friends.
So what’s wrong with all that? Sounds like a win-win scenario for everyone involved! How have I gone and imagined this as exploitation?
Well, first of all this whole thing is a charade, a series of lies masked as charity and goodwill. However, it’s unlikely to be viewed as wrong or even unusual in your or almost anyone’s mind as we have accepted this as corporate convention and expect nothing less.
Second, the corporation has taken the public in as party to a weird kind of hostage/blackmail situation. “I have this million bucks I’d like to give to your favourite charity but if you don’t praise me enough, and in just the way I’d like, no one is going to see a penny!” Not only is this dirty but it’s also, again, a lie. They’re not going to fail to donate all of the $1 million that’s been allocated; all of this money will go somewhere for needed tax (and public relations) purposes.
And, thirdly, if you think about it for a minute, there’s some devastating economics going on here too. Historically this company would have had to either print and mail millions of fliers, or buy ad space in a national paper or a spot on the tele. All of these activities would have made work for people, would have put money in the pockets of graphic designers, photographers, type-setters, printers, the postal service, actors, video producers, musicians and sound editors, ad companies, journalists, news organizations, small and large media companies and more. None of this is happening. The mega-corporation saves piles of money conducting essentially the same business. And they do so with fewer employees (because they just fired their whole marketing and PR team, nine people, and handed it all over to Jasper, who you’ll recall is working for free.) The remaining employees are making a fraction of the salary their predecessors made, because the union is gone and they’ve moved over to a project-based contract model (which gives the “flexibility, new eyes and fresh ideas with each new project”) an
away from having permanent, full-time employees (those pesky types who are always demanding medical and dental, paid sick days, maternity/paternity leave, and the like.)
And of course the funds that historically went toward providing jobs and living wages to the public – upon whom this company and all others rely – now goes to the senior management and into campaigning for tax relief and incentives (of which they already have many), loosening regulations on the products and services they deliver (which have never been more diminished or enforced by so few), fighting court cases (that, if they lost, would mean virtually nothing), and undermining their local unions (in the few places that have any left.)
It’s increasingly difficult to frame these practises in their historical context and feel that what we have today as little more than a kind of friendly slave culture. (But this isn’t a new idea: it was commonly heard among workers at the dawn of the industrial revolution.) Was that over the top? You think I’m being hyperbolic? Well, I ask you, didn’t this multinational corporation just enlist a million people (through lies and deceit and not by their own informed free-will) to pull off an advertising and public relations campaign for it? Yes. Wasn’t this a campaign that would have cost the company tens of millions at any other time or using any other method? Yes. Did it, what is essentially a multi-million dollar global campaign, cost the corporation a dime? No. Did it result in any kind of reward, whatsoever, for those doing all of work pulling it off? No.
Isn’t it enough that the company was going to get a huge tax credit? If not, wasn’t it then enough that the company was able to additionally exploit this financial benefit in a dozen other ways through it’s corporate spin machine? Why does the company need to use the public in this way on top of everything else? Because they can? Because everyone else is doing it?
Given that the most watched television event in U.S. history was the latest Super Bowl (netting around 100 million viewers) and an ad spot there cost between $4 million and $8 million, it seems to me this corporation owes each of their diligent retweeters at least $20-$50 for services rendered. And why not? (Why do corporations pay millionaire celebrities $10 million for an endorsement but they won’t pay a million people $1 for theirs?) If for no other reason, this company and others like it should pay their retweeters for the sake and future of capitalism. (With more and more money in fewer and fewer hands, and corporations stockpiling their loot, who is going to buy all the stuff needed to keep our economy going?) Or have we already moved on? Maybe we have. Maybe we are living in a post-capitalist society. Seems like that more and more every day.
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