Costly Red Campaign Reaps Meager $18 Million

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- It's been a year since the first Red T-shirts hit Gap shelves in London, and a parade of celebrity-splashed events has

The collective marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola for the Red campaign has been enormous, with some estimates as high as $100 million.

The collective marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola for the Red campaign has been enormous, with some estimates as high as $100 million.

followed: Steven Spielberg smiling down from billboards in San Francisco; Christy Turlington striking a yoga pose in a New Yorker ad; Bono cruising Chicago's Michigan Avenue with Oprah Winfrey, eagerly snapping up Red products; Chris Rock appearing in Motorola TV spots ("Use Red, nobody's dead"); and the Red room at the Grammy Awards. So you'd expect the money raised to be, well, big, right? Maybe $50 million, or even $100 million.

Try again: The tally raised worldwide is $18 million.

The disproportionate ratio between the marketing outlay and the money raised is drawing concern among nonprofit watchdogs, cause-marketing experts and even executives in the ad business. It threatens to spur a backlash, not just against the Red campaign -- which ambitiously set out to change the cause-marketing model by allowing partners to profit from charity -- but also for the brands involved.