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Ad Agency Uses Homeless as Wi-Fi Hotspots
Innovative Marketing or Just Insulting and Silly?
Marketing firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty is courting more than a little controversy with their decision to use homeless people as walking human Wi-Fi hotspots at this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin. The ad agency is calling "Homeless Hotspots" a "charitable experiment" aimed at drumming up funds for homeless shelters as an alternative to things like homeless selling newspapers. Each homeless person dons a T-shirt promoting the program and carries a 4G MiFi device users can pay what they want to access. But Wired critiques the program as a shallow and ultimately hollow effort to simply drum up publicity for supposedly "cutting edge" marketing that ultimately doesn't do all that much for the plight of the homeless.

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cdru
Go Colts
MVM
join:2003-05-14
Fort Wayne, IN

2 recommendations

cdru

MVM

From the Wired article...

quote:
This is my worry: the homeless turned not just into walking, talking hotspots, but walking, talking billboards for a program that doesn’t care anything at all about them or their future, so long as it can score a point or two about digital disruption of old media paradigms. So long as it can prove that the real problem with homelessness is that it doesn’t provide a service.
So tell me Tim Carmody, what have you or wired done about homeless? So what if "Homeless Hotspots" make them walking, talking billboards that don't care anything about the actual issue. It gives a few homeless guys some work for awhile and gets the company some advertising. There's no harm in either. It's not like they are underpaying children to perform toxic or hazardardous tasks or the similar.

R4M0N
Brazilian Soccer Ownz Joo
join:2000-10-04
Glen Allen, VA

2 recommendations

R4M0N

Member

It's not insulting if they get government assistance though?

So the company provides the hotspots and all proceeds of the sale of hotspot-time goes to the homeless person. And you people are calling it exploitation?

Would you rather they live the rest of their lives on government-backed shelters? What better way to spark someone's entrepreneurial spirit than to hand them a ready-made product and letting them sell it and keep all the profit even if they had to become walking billboards (which is not even the case here)?

Government welfare slavery (we keep you dependent and you keep us in power) is OK but let a company use homeless people in a way that actually benefits the homeless and all of a sudden it's "demeaning", "shallow", and "exploitation"...