Deep Jive Interests

Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Usher and other celebrities have joined a new campaign called Digital Life Sacrifice on behalf of Keys’ charity, Keep a Child Alive. The entertainers plan to sign off of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday, which is World AIDS Day. The participants will sign back on when the charity raises $1 million.

“It’s really important and super-cool to use mediums that we naturally are on,” Keys said in a phone interview from New York last week.

For the campaign — which also includes Jennifer Hudson, Ryan Seacrest, Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Elijah Wood, Serena Williams, Janelle Monae and Keys’ husband, Swizz Beatz — celebrities have filmed “last tweet and testament” videos and will appear in ads showing them lying in coffins to represent what the campaign calls their digital deaths.

Raising money for children? Good thing.  Raising it on World AIDS day for a charity devoted to providing anti-retrovirals to HIV positive children?  I like it.

Getting celebrities to sign off Twitter and to film them in coffins as  a “last tweet and testament?” Wow.  Words fail me as to exactly how … tacky and tasteless this exercise is.  Don’t believe me?  Head over to the site to see for yourself.

Don’t get me wrong: this is a great cause.  I just question this marketing effort behind it.  It goes without saying that HIV is a deadly disease which causes incredible hardship, suffering, and death around the world.  But, having celebrities “play dead” in coffins just seems to trivialize it all.

And besides, with a strictly “negative” appeal by celebrities to not sign back on until $1M is raised, isn’t that just begging some cynics to appeal to everyone to *not* donate any money?

And when will we begin to see others publicly acclaim that some celebrities are better off “in coffins” than they are alive?  (not that I am, of course — but you can bet some smart aleck will)

Man, I’d love to hear a professional marketer’s opinion on this.  I’ll bet there’s going to be a lot of noise, but not a lot of signal on this one — which is a shame, because I think direct appeals in a tasteful way could just as easily raise the money that they’re looking for.