Has anyone else noticed the rise in product commercials that are trying to purport that their purchase will lead to a better world, aka all that stuff about "going green", as well products that will inadvertently save lives?

Seriously, if I see another Pampers commerical where the babies of the world hug a wonderful woman for buying those diapers 'cause each purchase will get a vaccine for a third-world baby, I'm gonna hurl. I mean, it is important in one sense, but in another sense, I hate the idea of linking someone's life with freakin' disposable, non-biodegradable diapers.

I also really like the BP commericials where they show families frolicking over former landfills turned into parks...'cause it's not like Love Canal could happen again or something.

Anyone else wanna report on commericials that are trying to go with a "save the world with our product!" slant?

My favorites are the indisputably environmentally-unfriendly companies jumping onto the "green" bandwagon. Like the coal commercials where they claim they're more beneficial for the environment than oil. Nothing says environmentally conscious like strip mining. I almost want to laugh at the absurdity, but then I realize there are people that actually believe this crap.

The Tampax commercial where for every tampon you buy, one is sent to a poor school girl in Africa (?!), also comes to mind. Or the Red campaign. They'll send 10 cents to [Good Cause] if you buy their product. So they mark up the price 15 cents to cover the difference AND benefit from all the people rushing out to buy it because they believe they're being charitable for spending $300 on an iPod so $1 goes to fight AIDS.

I'm fed up with the smug attitude many of these companies and the celebrities that shill for them convey. Like they're soooooooo much better than you because you don't "buy green" *heavy, put-upon sigh*. Bring the prices down and cut the attitude, and maybe I'll consider buying your crap. Until then, I'm buying as many chemicals in nonrecyclable containers as I can just to piss everybody off.

The Wal-Mart ads where they talk about how if every one of the millions of people who shop at Wal-Mart bought just one (insert product here) it would do some wonderful, magical thing for the planet.

Yeah, help Wal-Mart save the world and destroy America at the same time, fantastic.

Never mind that I can't use those damn energy saver lightbulbs because the light from them gives me a headache. Stop trying to make me feel guilty, Wal-Mart!

Not to mention those energy saving bulbs contain mercury (I just checked the box to make sure) so you save $20 a month by switching to those bulbs, but you pollute the environment with toxic chemicals. I'm going back to regular bulbs.

They had a very good article about commercials like these in Bitch magazine a while back. They encourage Americans to think that they "save the world" through conspicuous consumption. In other words, through no work or sacrifice. It would do a lot more good to encourage people to write to Congress to enact policy change, but they risk losing people who support the current administration. It would also be better to take the money that you would use to buy, say, a cell phone from the Red campaign, and just donate it directly to an AIDS charity. But then you wouldn't have the visible cue to other people that you did something good. I heard the Red campaign didn't do very well. I also wonder if some of these things could possibly backfire--like when Nestle made a big show of donating baby formula to developing countries only to have the babies get sick because the formula had to be mixed with water and the local water was tainted.

Not to mention they are undimmable.

Not to mention also that you practically need to call the Haz-Mat team if you should have the mis-fortune of dropping and shattering one. I saw a news report on this very thing this morning. They demonstrated to the viewers the proper procedure of how to clean up and dispose of a shattered mercury bulb. Suffice it to say, no one will go through this rigamarole: they either won't know how to dispose of mercury safely, or they won't care.

And the scary part? There's apparently NO MENTION of this on the package the bulb comes in. So the average not-aware-of-my-surroundings consumer is going to think these are like regular incandescent, which they aren't.

I wonder what horrible accident/lawsuit will occur before these companies will publish this info on the packages.

Yeah, finding out about that after breaking at least one or two of those around my house over the last couple of years was unnerving. Also, apparently you're supposed to separate them from your regular trash and dispose of them as hazardous waste. Which I also didn't know.

For the time being I've stopped buying the darn things, especially since they really don't last as long as they estimate that they will. "Oh, spend a little more, because it uses less electricity, and besides, they can last up to ten years!" Yeah, if you never turn that light on, I guess.

I don't normally think of myself as unaware of my surroundings; but I have to admit it never occurred to me to wonder if these lightbulbs were bizarrely hazardous.

So, yeah, that's something they should mention to the consumer!

I'm so glad I read this thread. I actually considered buying some of those light bulbs.

I have those bulbs, and although I saw a dramatic decrease in my bills, I'm kind of having second thoughts now, seeing as how I didn't realize they had mercury in them.

How do the compact fluorescent bulbs compare, mercury-wise, to regular fluorescent bulbs? They're everywhere!

Before everyone freaks out about CFLs, check out snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/cfl.asp

They have mercury, but reports of their danger are exagerrated, especially the email warning thats going around. I suspect that is what most news stations have picked up on. I've seen it on my news too. It's not like we all died from our old thermometers that had mercury & we put them in our mouths.

Yeah. I'll stick with my compact energy bulbs from WAL-Mart, I think.

Though word about Wal-Mart's..."Oh yes, we're helping to save the world with our Green products, yet we're also helping to destroy the American economy and pay our employees peanuts!"

I did laugh at the absurdity of the coal mining commericials that tried to make it somehow seem environmentally sound.

I have this one lamp with a CFL. I installed the CFL sometime in the 1990s. Since then I've moved 4 times. I use the lamp daily. I'm still on the original CFL (I bought the lamp and bulb at Ikea).



Well, I have worked for a few companies that have done these cause marketing initiatives. I can tell you that I have never seen a situation where the price is marked up to cover a cause marketing program - for one, getting a price increase through a retailer like Wal-mart or Kroger is incredibly difficult, and secondly, it's not worth the internal tracking it would require to change the price for a limited period of time. I hate Wal-mart (I work in the food industry; I had a product on which we tried to pass through a commodity price increase and Wal-mart stopped selling the product) but they are very good about holding prices down for consumers. If you notice, however, the donations are all for minimal amounts (5 cents on the Pampers program), so that it's not expensive for the brand to run the program and they get lots of goodwill. I mean, I am a marketer, so I should see through programs like this, but I'm also a weepy new mom who can't stand the idea of little poverty stricken children dying for lack of a vaccine. And if manufacturers didn't offer programs like this, a lot of times retailers like Wal-mart won't carry them.

Wow, I totally sound like a shill for corporate America. I totally don't mean to.

I've also had good luck with the CFLs lasting a long time -- and also picked them up supercheap through a NJ state incentive program. Regarding disposal, a lot of local Hazardous Waste disposal programs now accept them (check here, and, yes, both regular fluorescents and compacts have mercury), and Ikea and Home Depot are both accepting disposals (CFLs only) at most locations.

Thanks for the Snopes link; what they are saying you should do when one breaks (get everyone out of the room, shut off the air conditioning, open the window, carefully clean up without vacuuming) is pretty much what I've heard. Of course I didn't hear it until after we'd had a couple of broken CFL's. I looked on the boxes yesterday at the store out of curiosity, and they have a tiny little fine-print box on the bottom that says something like "Contains mercury -- comply with local regulations for disposal." Not exactly informative.

Wormlegs, congrats on the lifespan of your lightbulb. Maybe it's because I got mine at Home Depot or the grocery store instead of IKEA, but while they seem to last longer than standard lightbulbs, I rarely seem to get a full year out of them.

A little more on-topic, while I'm all in favor of breast cancer research, companies repackaging their normal crap in pink labels to support breast cancer research (I suspect by something like 1/10 of a cent per can of chicken soup or whatever) just seems like a crass ploy to increase sales.

I always thought the idea of sending yogurt lids to help cure cancer weird. People are going to send lids after they've been licked off? Yuck!

I always just rinsed those lids instead of licking them.

As for CFLs, I think I'll avoid them for now. Given my level of clumsiness, I'd probably have to have the local Hazmat team on my speed dial.

I worked for a company that had a breast-cancer pink ribbon tie in. It was absolutely put in place to get sales. No one in my management gave a rat's ass about cancer, helping women, whatever. I mean, they all liked women, I suppose (most of them were married to women) but it was a totally craven gesture. They looked at who bought our products and then did some research to see what tie-in would make those consumers buy more of our product. I think on a product that we made $1 on, we'd donate like 5 cents max to cancer research. And we capped our donation at $50,000 (which is NOTHING). But we got a lot of hullabulloo about it, and the increased sales more than offset our $50K commitment. It was gross. The whole time we worked on this, I felt like coming home and showering in scalding water to get the stink off me.

I saw a commercial the other night that is not exactly a "buy our product, save the world" type of advertisement, but nevertheless made me think of this thread. Bank of America apparently has a campaign encouraging Americans to trust them with their savings because saving is what we do. We save "everything" -- the rainforests, endangered species, etc. -- so we should certainly save our money and we should save it with them. Which is just wrong on every possible level. We (as a whole) save almost nothing in this country, as we're a completely disposable society. As just one example, we don't save the environment, because we think we need bottled water even though it's less-regulated than tap water (and often is tap water), uses petroleum to make the bottles and ship them, and takes up landfill space when most of those bottles are not recycled. And we sure as hell do not save our money; the personal savings rate is the lowest it has ever been (for a variety of reasons, many of which are caused by circumstances created by bad policies and some of which are caused by bad personal decisions). So it rubbed me all kinds of wrong ways for B of A to present America as this land of responsibility and then attempt to capitalize on that in order to earn more profit.



It's not just that these ads exalt conspicuous consumption, but excessive consumption. The best way to "buy green" is to buy less (the forgotten "reduce" part of "reduce, re-use, recycle"). These ads say that instead of cutting down on products and on packaging in the products we buy, we should buy more. Which makes perfect sense coming from a company that makes its profits by selling goods, but it's infuriating to see it dressed up as an ecologically beneficial endeavor.

Gaaah! Yep, if you read the fine print here, it says that a whopping 5 cents is going to give a mom a tetanus shot. OK, yes, lifesaving, but the way they put it out there, the vaccines are going to the babies, not their moms. Personally I'd rather but a cheaper diaper and send the difference to an organization and get a whole assload of vaccines for the 2 bucks or whatever I'd just saved.

This is not necessarily a "save the world" ad, but Dove is now advertising that when you buy their products, you will be contributing towards something called "self-esteem workshops" for young girls...WTF??? The ad shows a girl looking at billboards and watching TV bombarding her with images of models and America's perception of beauty. Then you see some awards ceremony where a girl promises to see herself as beautiful every day. I'm sorry, but this seems like the stupidest "good cause" ever. I'm all for preventing kids dying from anorexia and all, but seriously, is my buying some shampoo or facial cleanser really going to make that big of a difference? There are some problems that can't be fixed by throwing money at them. Am I crazy, or shouldn't self-esteem start with the parents instead of a class?

See that campaign especially ticks me off. So not only are we using a crass ploy to increase our sales but we're not going to just donate the money noooo. You have to send in your lids and if you don't do the work those sick women ain't gettin' nothing!

Phooey.

Yet a fair trade label on a product or donating to the World Wildlife fund (especially if there is a picture of say a panda on the label) totally sucks me in.

Word. Go into a U.S. supermarket in October and for several weeks thereafter, and the place is a sea of pink. And the pink Campbell's soup cans just make me go, "Ewww!" All I can think of is "cancer soup."

A discreet little pink ribbon printed on the label is one thing, but redoing the whole label in pink ... well, see my reaction above.

I'm a woman. I have breasts. I hope I get to keep them for the rest of my life, so of course I support efforts to find a cure for breast cancer. But I also support efforts to find cures for ovarian cancer, brain cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, ALS, lupus ... I know I'm not the only one who's bugged by the fact that breast cancer gets all the hype, if not all the money.

And don't get me started on the "we're green!" ads on the part of companies who make their money off products that are decidedly *not* green. Even if Wally World paid its workers handsomely and didn't do the damage it does to local economies, the fact remains that it's probably the world's biggest retailer of nonbiodegradable, landfill-clogging *plastic* goods.

(steps off biodegradable wooden soapbox)

It's always bugged the hell out of me that Esurance claimed that they were more environmentally conscious, because they do everything electronically, so they use less paper.

Not nearly as evil as some of the stuff everyone else is complaining about, but still, it bugs the crap outta me.

Those of you who have concerns about the pink products and other breast cancer initiatives might want to check out this site:

http://www.thinkbeforeyoupink.org/Pages/PinkPromos.html

Very thought provoking and it does cut through the hype.

In another topic, I've been thinking about the Tampax "let's send tampons to Africa" campaign. On the surface, it <sounds> good, but whenever I saw the commercials, I kept thinking about a campaign done back in the 1970s or 80s in which free formula was sent to third world nations. As a result, the moms thought the formula was better than breast milk, and ended up starving themselves and other family members so they could afford to buy the formula. Disaster all around. I can't help but thinking the tampon donation is going to have a similar result.

There's also the fact that they often didn't have access to safe water supplies to mix the formula, and that cost a lot of infants' lives.

I can see the tampon thing backfiring as well. Users with limited funds may wear them too long and risk toxic shock syndrome. And in areas with less than state-of-the-art waste disposal facilities, used tampons lying around a trash heap or whatever could pose a public health hazard.

From what I understand, they actually send washable, reusable pads to the third world, not tampons.

Would that still be safe since some third-world countries do not have reliable places to wash these pads?

I would think the customers would want to print their receipt so they'll have proof of insurance. So the company can say it's not using paper, but the customers still should.

I thought I'd give you guys a link to the commercial that I think is the grand-daddy of the "buy our product, save the world" concept...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mOEU87SBTU

Who knew that buying coca-cola would erase racial prejudice and ensure world peace?

Okay, I thought the pink Energizer batteries were funnier than hell -- they were PINK BATTERIES, for crying out loud! What's not to like? But then I got over it and realized they'd be in my radio where I couldn't see them, and I didn't go out of my way to buy them because I'd save somebody's boobies if I did. They were there and I needed batteries.

But, yeah, I'm also a sucker for free-trade, organic coffee beans. At least I'm actually supporting somebody's livelihood as opposed to paying lip service to a cause.

And, since they're hand-picked, you're helping the coffee bean harvesters to avoid pesticides.

Plus...IT'S COFFEE! Everybody wins!

So by purchasing Dove soap, you're supporting their efforts to cure the world of girls with bad body images. And so far, they've "saved" 2 million girls who will never fall prey to the media's unrealistic depictions of body types, because as the little blond girl who spoke at that Dove workshop announced to a group of mothers and her peers, she has learned to see herself as beautiful because of the Dove Workshops about "real" beauty.

Coincidentally, the girl who the commercial was focused on was blond, white, and thin with blue eyes. Geez, they're really promoting different standards of beauty here. [/sarcasm]

I can't stand those Dove ads.



As a lifelong tree-hugger, it's great to see people jumping on the environmental bandwagon. But the idea that you can help save the environment by buying a certain product? No. The best thing you can do is to not buy so much stuff in the first place.

I'm just bothered by the fact that they used a yet another cute blond kid to supposedly advance the diversity of beauty. I would have bought what they were trying to say if they had used an overweight Pakistani girl or something like that, not a girl who will most likely be considered attractive by the time she has to contend with middle school girls who hold everyone to atrocious beauty standards.

Clorox is now advertising a line of "earth friendly" cleaning products that work just as well as their regular products, but which are non-toxic and safe for the environment.

Well, goody for them. But what I want to know is, if they're capable of making non-toxic products that are safe for the environment and that work just as well as their regular products, why are they still making and selling their regular products that aren't safe for the environment?

I love the new Brita Filter ads that show a couple of guys playing basketball in the background while focusing on the plastic bottled water with the words "One hour at the court, forever in a landfill. Drink Responsibly." on the screen. I love the use of another product's ad campaign, but with a whole new spin. And I love that they are advertising how bad bottled water is for the world. It's great.

Because their new line of products don't disinfect.

Well, yeah, that's what happens when you spend decades scaring people into believing that the only way mankind will survive is to kill 99.9% of germs. They can't just take all that away and admit they might have been wrong.

JuneCsEvilTwin, you are my hero. I, too, support efforts to find a cure for breast cancer (as well as other forms of cancer). I lost a childhood friend to this disease several years ago. She was in her early 30's and left two young children behind. My brother died of cancer when he was 20. An aunt died of colon cancer. But I also volunteer with a community group that is also trying to raise awareness and funds that always seems to get swamped under by the Pink Tide.

Maybe if we consumed less and donated what we saved to the cause of our choice...

I would find the Dove campaign more compelling if they used different kinds of girls (like the non-blonde, blue-eyed, not thin girl).
Won't make me buy Dove products (I break out in a rash) but I think they'd be putting their money where their ad campaign is.

Except that the stupid Brita filters themselves are plastic, and you can't recycle them (unless you live in Europe). I tend to believe that one filter a month in the landfill is better for the environment than 30+ water bottles (even though the bottles can theoretically be downcycled, it's still a major waste of petroleum to create them in the first place), but it just seems slightly hypocritical of Brita. Maybe it's just me.

I think it is hypocritical of Brita to trumpet their green cred precisely because they refuse to institute filter recycling in the US despite having it in Europe.