Those who watched the Apprentice a week ago Sunday saw a competition to promote the sale of Symantec’s Norton 360 computer protection software that is packaged along with Lifelock’s identity fraud protection service for $79.99. The commercial that immediately followed the selection of the winner promised to give $10 of each sale to a particular charity.
What probably went unnoticed by most people was a fine print disclaimer that flashed on the screen momentarily, limiting the donation.
*Mouse Print:
“up to $25,000”
While certainly any donation to a charity is a kind gesture by these companies, and $10 is a good percentage of the selling price, the cap on the donation really means that only the first 2500 orders will trigger it. If your company had in essence a two hour commercial for a product on national TV, wouldn’t you expect that tens of thousands of orders would be placed? If you then ran a commercial the following week on the Apprentice (last night) and said the charitable donation offer was being continued, wouldn’t you expect even more people to sign up? And wouldn’t you expect some goodly percentage of people watching either week might erroneously believe that they were helping a charity when in fact they may not have been?
To add insult to injury, if someone visits the Apprentice website at NBC.com, to find out about the offer, they would have seen the ad above. When clicking it, the user is taken to this descriptive page:
In neither place is there any mention of a $10 donation. In fact, in order for there to be a $10 donation, one of two promo codes have to be filled in on the order form (and they are not mentioned at all on the NBC site).
*MOUSE PRINT:
To make matters worse, a promo code that does not trigger the charitable donation is already filled in on the ordering page.
*MOUSE PRINT:
To their credit, both Lifelock and Symantec mention the charitable donation limit of $25,000 on their websites (albeit in small type), and pre-fill-in the proper code on their ordering forms. Mouse Print* wrote to NBC and Symantec to point out the problem, but no explanation or fix has yet been made.
I don’t care for companies that take my money and use it for a tax deduction, and cheap PR, while increasing the price of the product I want to buy and
I can make charitable donations own my own very well, thank you.
Write to the Donald.
I bet he would be upset.
“the Donald” upset? HE was probably the “Charity”!!!
If there were outrage at such duplicity, instead of accepting it as the “norm”, enforced by never using the product being promoted, it would stop.
We CAN make a difference. Just remember that corpoate entities only hear it when MONEY talks – just like congress.
And that’s why I stopped watching The Apprentice.
I understand the idea of the Apprentice – like many reality shows – is to lie, cheat and manipulate so that you win. I thought CSPAN did that by covering Congress.
//“the Donald†upset? HE was probably the “Charityâ€!!!//
Some years back I read this piece under “Life’s like that” in Reader’s Digest.
One bloke kept a collection box on his table in his office with the caption “Aid to the Children of Israel” printed on it.
People piously put in money in that box for a few days until a busybody realized that the person who put up this collection box on his table was actually named Charles E. Israel!
Regards,
Dondu N. Raghavan