Sometimes you may hear about a celebrity trying to get their fans to buy their stuff that isn’t selling by putting a charity logo on it and saying 5% or so goes to help people not die somewhere. It’s easy to look good when your name and “save a life” are in the same sentence (though, it has to look legit. “Read Steve’s blog, save a life!” – Did that make you feel good? Hint: You are currently reading Steve’s blog!).
I imagine the first celebrity that thought “Wow, I’m in a position to really get some money flowing to a good cause!” did so purely with the intention of doing good. Later it became a cool thing to do, and eventually it got to the point where if you’re not doing it, you’re kind of an ass in the public eye. That’s a shame, really, because the most popular of them are able to give themselves a squeaky clean image, while the less popular ones continue to struggle with public image.
Recently, a bunch of notable meatbags decided they were going to ditch Twitter until their fans donate one million to charity.
We all generally understand that celebrities make a lot of money. I estimated that the group could come up with that much money in about a month. Now, I don’t make a habit of looking up how much celebrities make, so if the sources I found are unreliable, bear with me. This may come as a shock, but they could actually come up with this money in a pretty short amount of time.
Lady Gaga is one of the highest paid celebrities of 2010. Not only does she have a lot of income, but any fan (or anyone that skims through pop music news, really) knows she has a ton of useless outfits that she uses to propel her image as “that misunderstood pop star”. She could have picked a few sets of clothes and stuck with those, and gave the money she spent on body-wrapping garbage to this charity. Sure, she may have not spent a million on it all (well, at least we can only hope she didn’t), but it could have gone to this charity.
Even with that aside, this is a celebrity game. They know some fans will miss their attempts at being insightful or humorous in less than 140 characters, so they make them have to work for it. The celebrity organizes it, the fans give their money (remember to feel good about it!), and the end result is that the charity gets the money the celebrity intended to give, but the celebrity didn’t give it; they’ll thank the fans (and be sure to say that they couldn’t have been done without them!) and gain more publicity (possibly awards, too) for themselves, which results in (with the every-now-and-then exceptions aside) even more money for them! It’s like they’ve made an investment in themselves using your work and effort.
It isn’t even a well-thought-out gimmick. They could have turned it into a competition; “Come back to Twitter!” versus “Leave forever!”. They could probably triple the potential income for that charity if people could donate to it to get that bunch of clowns to leave for good. Perhaps they already knew the outcome of that, though.
You are literally being told “I can’t spare any money at the moment, but I’m sure you can.” by people with more money than you.
Related reading I found:
Lady Gaga is Still a Spoiled Teenager
Another List of Celebrity Incomes
