February 6, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Has you charity been offered some free radio airtime, billboard space, or other marketing availabilities usually out of reach for most nonprofit groups?
Free might sound like a good deal, but it isn’t always, says Jeff Brooks, creative director at Merkle, a direct-marketing agency that serve charities.
“Donated media can be fine, but here’s a precaution: Don’t take something free that you wouldn’t pay for,” he cautions on his Donor Power Blog.
One problem is that the promotional time or space being given away might be, in Mr. Brooks’ words “garbage,” (or more gently, “media they haven’t been able to sell because it has little or no value in the marketplace.”)
Then you have to factor in that that while it’s free to get your message, it’s not free when charity employees have to spend time on a new project.
“Every moment you spend creating and managing campaigns for free media is a moment you’re not working on something that might actually get you somewhere,” Mr. Brooks writes.
Finally, he writes, “free media breeds stupidity.” By this he means, poorly thought out and designed advertising. As an example, he cites One Laptop Per Child a charity in Cambridge, Mass. whose mission is to provide sturdy laptop computers to children in developing countries.
In a previous blog, he wrote about how, in 2007, the charity started a campaign to allow people to buy one of the group’s laptops while providing a free one to a child at the same time. The charity sold 185,00 laptops that year, bringing in $37-million.
Last year, despite receiving as much as $15-million in free media exposure—TV, print, and billboard—the charity sold only 12,500 laptops through this scheme. While the economy and increased competition from other computer makers were given as causes of the 93-percent drop in sales, Mr. Brooks says stupid ads bear some of the blame, including a “not competent” billboard he says violates “basic design knowledge.”
And then there is the charity’s video spot where a computer-generated image of John Lennon talks about the laptop program. Though the ads were approved by Mr. Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, based on comments found around the Internet, many though it was cheesy to bring the former Beatle “back to life” to talk about a technology that didn’t even exist when he was killed nearly 30 years ago.
In the end, Mr. Brooks advises charities to examine all offers of free media “with a jaded, cynical eye.”
“You shouldn’t do things that don’t work just because it’s affordable to do so,” he writes.
What are your experiences, pro or con, with donated advertising time and space?
