Earlier this week, we saw some promotional posters for a new campaign to raise money on International Aids Day for a charity founded by Alicia Keys called “Keep Hope Alive.” The campaign featured many celebrities in caskets as a metaphor for their “digital death” including Justin Timberlake, Jennifer Hudson, Ryan Seacrest, Kim Kardashian, Usher and Lady Gaga, with the promise that they’d all stay off social media starting Wednesday, December 1, until $1 million was raised. It’s Friday and the latest update on the “Buy Life” website has less than $200,000 being raised for charity. Does this mean we’ll have a quiet holiday season? Will someone call time on this experiment and let these celebrities start tweeting again? Yahoo’s OMG has this news, along with some analysis of why the campaign has been unsuccessful.
The nifty campaign by Alicia Keys’ “Keep a Child Alive” charity launched on Wednesday (World AIDS Day), declaring that Hollywood would die “a digital death” until a casket full of cash was raised.
“The world’s top celebrities are sacrificing their digital lives to give real life to millions of people affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa and India,” the campaign states. “That means no more Twitter or Facebook updates from any of them. No more knowing where they are, what they had for dinner, or what interesting things are happening in their lives. From here on out, they’re dead. Kaput. Finished.”
Celebrities including Ryan Seacrest, Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga, Serena Williams, Justin Timberlake, and Elijah Wood all took part in the campaign — many posing “dead” in caskets for the cause and recording video statements before their figurative demise.
The organizers promised that when fans donate more than $1,000,000, “everyone will be back online and tweeting in no time.”
As of 7 p.m. EST Wednesday, however, just $70,000 had been donated — meaning unless Seacrest’s fans come up with $930,000, the “American Idol” host and the rest of the “dead” celebrities won’t be tweeting for the foreseeable future.
(UPDATE: As of 7:30 p.m. EST Thursday, the total is $180,950 — still more than $800,000 shy of their goal.)
Kidding aside, two fundamental problems with this fundraising stunt:
1. The organizers put a $10 minimum on donations. Alicia Keys or Lady Gaga fans might be willing to part with a cup of coffee, but not what it would cost to download their next album on iTunes. The economy hasn’t recovered that much.
2. Another critical error — by keeping the celebrities off Twitter and Facebook during the donation process, the campaign is losing an enormous amount of social media marketing — from the “dead” celebrities themselves. What they should’ve done was have the threat of their collective “digital death” build up while they were allowed to solicit donations from their 30 million-plus followers on Twitter and Facebook today. If fans didn’t meet the stated goal, then kill them off, one by one.
[From OMG.Yahoo.com]
That’s sad, considering that it’s a good cause. The threshold donation should be $2 or less and maybe they would be able to make this work. They could also offer incentives, like random retweets and follows from celebrities for donors. I agree with OMG’s point that it was kind of dumb to tell the celebrities they couldn’t tweet until a million was raised. It must have been Alicia Keys’ idea. Most of the celebrities’ twitter accounts I checked are still inactive. Who is going to call time on this experiment? Will Kim Kardashian be the first to break the silence after she freaks out that she’s losing so much money for paid tweets? Why don’t these celebrities pony up the rest if they want to be back online? All joking aside, they should have asked for a million bucks to get the celebrities to stop using Twitter and Facebook for a day.
Photos via Amy Grindhouse and Zap2it
They can stay “dead” for all I care.
ETA: It’s a great cause, but as pointed out, the paradigm is flawed. Nothing like a whacky gimmick! Bet someone is gonna loose their job over this.
Let these celeb twits pony up the cash themselves to get back on Twitter. They can afford it more than the average person can, especially this time of year.
It’s false advertising to get our hopes up like this.
That’s how out-of-touch these celebs are….I wouldn’t mind if they stayed “dead”.
OR just maybe the reason why people aren’t rushing to donate money is b/c most of these celebrities are self-centered, attention whoring idiots or maybe it’s the ads that depict AIDS as a glamorous disease when it reality it’s not or maybe it’s Kim Kardashians freak face that scared people off and made them think it’s better for her to be dead than to bring her back to keep scaring ppl. I for one was not enticed to donate because of these ads. I will donate money to the cause on my own. I don’t need a p0rn star, homewrecker or an arrogant bastard telling me to donate.
What they should have done to GET $ for the cause, is tell people they would never Tweet again. They would have met their goal by now.
The reason they didn’t promote this ahead of time the way they should have is because they believe their own hype. These celebrities honestly believe that they are so important that their fans would rush to donate money but the truth is most of the people who follow these celebs on twitter are not followers of the celebs, they are followers of twitter. These people are easily replaceable, so no one with common sense is going to pay them to come back to twitter. The people donating are either going to be hardcore fans with nothing else to do or people who honestly believe in the cause, and for believers who honestly believe in the cause there are hundreds of aids charities they can give to. This was just a bad idea.
Yeah, I’m going to say that if they actually chose LIKEABLE, TRUE celebrities, the campaign would have been a success. These people are self-serving with an obviously over-inflated sense of self-importance. I’d pay to keep them OFF the social networks, but not to keep them ON.
Meanwhile, the world breathes a collective sigh of relief that these people are no longer tweeting….
I also think it is an extreme insult and the height of insensitivity for them to be posing off in coffins looking all glamourous and full of themselves, when there are people who have actually had to bury loved ones due to AIDS and other terrible diseases.
Wow, these “stars” spend more money on a purse than what my mom, dad and me make all together! It takes me an hour to make 7.25 and these guys want you to donate a minimum of 10 dollars to hear about what they are selling/eating/spending their money on! They can easily donate their own money instead and they could easily help out people and families in America that are starving, losing homes, losing jobs everyday.
Now if Kaiser said she wouldn’t do HGF anymore than we’d raise a million easy 🙂
Chelly, that is an excellent point.
Who the heck would even care if Kim K. or Ryan Seacrest drove off a cliff? They are less than worthless.
And Ms. Keyes has damaged her rep so terribly in the past year that I wouldn’t support ANYTHING she’s promoting. What a ridiculously ego driven campaign this is.
The only people involved that I even remotely give a care about are Elijah Wood and Lady Gaga. J. Hudson and Serena are OK too I suppose.
J.T and Usher are just meh.
Awe, I dont want Elijah wood or gaga dead.I love them. Those pictures are SO freaking creepy. I bet they would hve raised the money w/o Kim participating. Shes not good motivation.
this was so wrong on so many levels…
Elijah Wood there = random.
Also, they could have gotten him an appropriate, pocket-sized casket. Looks like a sharp newborn in a huge crib.
I love the guy so much 🙂
Yeah the cause is good but I’d only be willing to pay to stop Kardashian tweets.
what the hell is this. these dumbass celebrities (always the ones no one cares abt..need attention much) and their self satisfied campaigns. wowww so poetic and deep..i havent even heard of this until now and i already want it to go away!!
I think the $10 dollar minimum donation is too much. I think they could easily raise a million dollars asking kids to text and send a dollar each, but $10 is waaay too much!
Sorry, I know it’s a good cause but I find this hilarious. Alicia Keys started off saying that Lady GaGa’s fans alone would raise the dough in no time – and they haven’t even gotten close.
Even the fans are saying “$10 minimum? You know what, never mind. We don’t actually care that much about what you’re doing for dinner. I’ll drop some old clothes in at Oxfam and get my charity-related-temporary-reprieve-from-guilt that way.”
As for the non-fans, they’re just laughing their arses off at the fact that Kim Kardashian Is Dead (And Not Even Her Fans Give A $hit – dollar sign intended.)
How long before it becomes “Give a dollar to keep them offline, if that’s how you want it, you bitches”? Because that, I think, would have more takers.
@LittleDeadGirl…. ROFL! True that. If Kaiser threatened to stop HGF I would hit the streets and earn some cash to donate just to keep HGF up and running.
But the celebs on this obnoxious, lameass campaign? No. Besides, it’s only a million bucks. Seacrest probably has that in his wallet.
BTW, does anyone else think Alicia looks like she’s asleep and dreaming of puppies? That is not the face of death.
Hopefully a little prick to the self importance bubble these asses live in. I get tired of rich celebrities always glad handing their poor ass fans to come up with money. You guys are the ones that get paid $100k to stand around at a nightclub opening whereas your “fans” are likely making minimum wage at real jobs. Celebs should pony up the cash and STFU….
I thought TexasInAfrica had a good post on it. She calls it ‘badvocacy’ and lists a number of other reasons this was all a bad idea:
http://texasinafrica.blogspot.com/2010/11/its-all-about-meeeeeeeeeeeeeee.html
“What I do know is that the campaign has lots of markers of the sort of advocacy that raises eyebrows among people who know what they’re doing with these things. What are those telltale signs?
– The campaign emphasizes the innovative use of social media over what the money raised will actually be used for beyond vague promises to “keep a child alive.”
– Rather than allowing the voices of those living with HIV/AIDS to be heard, the campaign is all about celebrities and their voices or the lack thereof. The campaign reduces people living with HIV/AIDS to helpless victims in need of foreign saviors.
– There’s no measurement and evaluation data on the organization’s website that I can find. That data may or may not exist, but without it, there’s no way to evaluate whether Keep a Child Alive is using the most effective measures possible to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
-This particular event appears to be an attention-grabbing stunt. Need I point out that pictures of celebrities in coffins have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual experiences of people living with or in communities affected by this epidemic?”
Good looking corpse.
I’d pay to raise ElWood from the dead, but not the rest.
Hell, I’d pay a year’s salary to keep Kim K “dead” for life!
I would also donate money to keep these idiots away from any social media.
I think Alicia Keys is a talented singer and songwriter – but she is not a marketing genious. I heard that she is the one that came up with this idea – it had to be a celebrity herself who thought that people would pay in order to keep these idiots tweeting.
Can you even imagine the planning meetings that went into this campaign – well what do people care about more than showing statistics and photos of children dying of AIDS, I know, my asinine fucking tweets. News flash, implying your “digital” life is on par in terms of importance of actual human lives, is insulting and no one wants to support it. You’re literally asking people to support your ego, not keeping kids alive.
Elijah, what are you doing there?
How did he get lost with this bunch of wannabes?
I have to agree with Lisa that there is something contrived and insincere about this whole campaign. It just doesnt sit well with me for some reason. I’m just not moved by these fake dead narcissitic a-holes.
on bossip, they show celebrities’ tweets on a side bar..the other day i saw that kim k had tweeted something about her goin crazy bcuz she was dead and about donating to keep her alive
Misguided vanity in the guise of altruism. Is anybody really applauding this ghoulish fairground attraction? Do *ahem* ‘shrinking violets’ like Ryan Seacrest–from whom we usually hear nothing–truly believe that the very notion of their short absences from just one of twelve billion media outlets that bombard us with their presence and inanities every day is filling us with the vapours and forcing us to rend our tear-soaked garments in twain? Is a Kim Kardashian fan even old enough to make the kinds of decisions that include a credit card that hasn’t been stolen from a parent or legal guardian? Do these chemically-tampered horror shows know that something as natural as a death pose would never be credible from them, as the weapons-grade injection fodder existing within them will preserve their forms beyond the limits of time far more than mere coroner’s tools could ever do? Even Lenin can’t figure that one out.
I think what gets to me is the arrogance necessary to believe that the world is SO interested in their tweets that they would pay MONEY to get them back online.
I realize the campaign is for a wonderful cause. But they’re doing it backwards. I mean, what better method could someone use to gain money than having Kim promise to NEVER get online or tweet AGAIN. I’d probably take out loan just to accomplish that.
But don’t get me wrong, the cause deserves every bit of that money. I just don’t care for this gimmick.
Some of the people participating in this are completely unknown to me. The ‘celebrities’ participating in this could never tweet again for all I care, and Khole Kardashian’s participation in this event is mind boggling because I don’t understand how saving her digital life could ever be considered an incentive. The $10 minimum donation to ‘save the digital life’ of one of these losers is way too much, but I might pay $10 to shut them up forever.
Since you have to text a particular name to the number, I’m hoping that at the end of all of this we’ll get to find out who raised the most money. Bet it won’t be Khloe!
The celebrity they really need is Justin Bieber. His stupid little fans would be donating mommy and daddy’s money left and right before they even had permission.
This campaign, the photos, all of it is just tasteless as hell. Makes me want to puke.
This really disturbs me.Just looking at these pictures makes me want to puke.Maybe its because someone I love very much just died,but this seems so wrong to me….
It’s a tasteless and narcissistic effort to raise money for a good cause.
Here’s an idea: each of those celebs donates $1million of their own money as a matching gift. Then it is up to the fans to donate money in order to match it. I would give to that- if I knew that my $5 would be matched by their $5, effectively doubling my gift. This idea is stupid.
Yeah, count me in on the “Elijah, what the HECK are you doing here?” wagon. I’d raise him from the dead (and then I’d take him home and feed him and pet him and call him George, shortly before I was arrested for kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment and spent the rest of my life in a psych ward muttering about hobbits.)
…ahem.
Worst campaign ever
i’d say this wins for Worst Fundraiser Idea Ever award.
Nooo Elijah! how did they get you in there??
That dear boy’s heart is soo much bigger than his brain. I’m sure he thought he was helping.. poor guy.
Still an Elijah Wood Fan!
Ha Ha! You’re dead Kim – shut up!
Whoever thought of this advertising campaign should be shot. It’s just tasteless. Plus, the thought of actually having Ms. Kardashian dead, would be an early Christmas gift for many of us.
Good…now let’s keep them dead.
As someone with a potentially life-threatening disease, I find it disrespectful that these celebs are pretending to be dead for a cause. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not offended easily. But like so many of you have said, if they used their status to promote causes, instead of taking a picture and doing NOTHING, then maybe they would make a difference. Saying you are involved in a cause to help people, and then doing nothing but lay in a casket and look pretty (when you’re healthy AND rich) doesn’t do anything but make the public despise you even more. I would love Kardashian to give up her Kelly bag for charity, or have Seacrest use his “influence” to raise money.
And that’s my rant for the day. 🙂
creepy! Creepy! Creepy…..what dumb ass pics. Its just wrong on so many levels.
Alicia Keys looks really good in her photo and echoing Kim Kardashian – I guess Italy and Armenia have some bridge between.
I agree with most of you… but dear me, Daisy, I’m so sorry!!!
Exactly, Cleo. The fact that they insisted on posing all fancied up instead of with makeup to show the ravages of the disease makes it even more obnoxious.
i agree that this campaign is so narcissistic. I think the age of people that religiously care what these people tweet is too low to have a $10 minimum. I love to donate to charity and/or do my part to physically help causes, but this irks me. We could probably raise more money on a 50/50 $1 betting pool of who cracks first and has to tweet about what they ate for lunch. my bet goes to Kim K since that’s her main mode of regular exposure.
This is the best thread I have ever read on this site. Every single person echoed my thoughts and the fact that everyone agrees, shows me that we are ALL sick of famewhoring celebs.
Weird campaign and I don’t believe for one second some of these idiots will stick to being ‘dead’. I am so sick of Kim Kardashian.
I think this proves that the public doesn’t really give a shit if this lot never tweets again. Normal people would recognise that the lack of donations = lack of desire to do with participants. However Keys, Seacrest et al will be making 101 excuses why it didn’t work when they return to twitter before the $1M mark.
Why is Kim the only one posing stupid with her arm up in the photo, all like she’s trying to be sexy, and the other pics – although equally as dumb – actually have corpse poses? Ugh.
I’d pay more money if they would promise to never tweet again.
I’d bet the ten bucks that they didn’t tell Elijah who he would be “dead” with. That’s the only way I could see him getting involved in this campaign with these jackals.
That was the stupidest idea ever. And I kind of even glad that it bombed.
How on earth they thought it will work? How can ordinary people look at those posers, who have 8 cars, 5 homes and millions of dollars on their accounts… And all of them lie there for a PR photo shoot and want the poor people to pay their money…. If all those star posers would sigh a $50 000 check, each of them – then they would rise the money in a second. But no, we have to pay for it. And they would only have the glory an free publicity. 🙁
@Daisy – I’m SO sorry =( I can’t imagine how much it must suck to see something so stupid like this campaign after having experienced the real thing with someone you loved.
@Kate Hollifield – I agree with you. (My brother has CF, which is potentially life threatening, though he’s been very fortunate thank God), so I can also see from experience how outright stupid this whole thing is. But on that note, I do hope you’re doing well health wise =)
And my last point… WTF. Why did they have to have a ‘minimum’ amount you could donate? If this cause is so important, why wouldn’t they take whatever someone was able to give? Not everyone who works & has a family to support can pony up $10, no matter how wonderful the cause. Is $5 simply not good enough for these people? How much money are they turning away because it’s not their minimum?
Why don’t they donate the effing money themselves?????
It’s disgusting that these egomaniacs are equivocating social networking to actual human lives.
They can all stay dead, for all I care. (Or – They should fork over the difference before they’re allowed to twat again.)
. . . I’m disappointed with you, Elijah.
They could easily kick in a million between them and they wouldn’t even notice it gone. This sort of grandstanding for charity is more about promoting themselves than it is about helping anybody. Most decent people help charitable causes from time to time but the difference between them and these celebs is that they don’t have to bang a drum about it and expect something in return. I tell ya what if these celebs want to big themselves up in public someone should gather them all up and take them to a celebrity auction for charity where they could all bid against each other. Once their egos kicked in you’d see a massive amount of money raised for charity.
From their tweets to God’s ears.
No class campaign could at least give us a great, and ironic ending.
Kim is still trying to pose eventhough she’s dead!
The Photoshop budget alone for this chucklehead brigade could feed all the sherpas in Nepal for six years.
Looking petty wasp-waisted there, Kim…for the children!
Waaah waaaaah waaaa we’re rich, so donate money to encourage us to spend our money on frivolous things instead of helping humanity!
No one misses these celebs and they are alive (besides Serena)- why would Alicia think anyone would care about them being dead?
You mean Kim Kardashian isnt really dead???? Oh man I am so bummed.
Why doesnt she stop buying $20k Hermes bags and donate that money to this cause??? HYPOCRITES- all of them!
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