That part of the cost of their $50+M ad campaign was a $100k donation is no more interesting or relevant than how much they spent on animation to make their Noid ads or how much they spent to pay actors in their ads.
As an aside, some charities are scams, but many are not. There are tools you can use to determine which ones are trustworthy, but some basic common sense goes a long way too.
Also, nobody is under any impression that Dominos is a charity and not a pizza joint.
They weren't touting their charity. They were touting their charitable franchise owners. That's a major distinction.
Imagine if Google made an ad saying "We donated $50,000 to charity. Look how generous we are. Come work for Google". That would be nonsensical.
Now imagine if Google made an ad saying "Joe is a Googler. Joe donated $50,000 of his own money to charity. Look how wonderful our Googlers are. Come work for Google alongside people like Joe." Very cheesy, but it makes a lot more sense. Domino's ad is the latter, not the former.
Personally, I find all non anonymous charitable donations in poor taste, and that reflects badly on Dominos for someone thinking like me. But for those receiving charity, surely any amount greater than $0 is enough, since it is a charity.
They chose the proportion 500:1. It's comical. If you want to be seen as a good actor, don't take your dollar and then split a penny in 5 pieces and give one to charity.
They could have made 10x more of a donation and hardly touched the budget they had for their ads. Or 100x more and only slightly reduced the ads. All while increasing the advertising power of the donation they were showcasing in the ads themselves, so it's not like they'd simply be losing the money to charity.
That $50m is the amount decided to reach their audience. Increasing the donation won't increase the reach...
I remember recently a pizza chain in my province decided to stop all their ad campaign for a month and give the amount they would have spend otherwise to people. Hey if it works for Mr. Beast, it could work for them right? I saw it on Tiktok so a good platform to allow organic sharing, well a week later I started to see ads about it on Facebook... they didn't reach their audience.
So yeah that spending is for their ads, they are going to spend it, it's there for a reason. Believe me, if they could lower it in some way, they would... that's called business. Is there really anyone in the world happy to pay ads and that doesn't do anything to try to lower that cost?
At best they could avoid the bad press from r/antiwork (does it really matters? how many views did that get versus that $50m ads?), but I got a feeling that they would still complains about the fact that they spend more in ads than in the actual donation.
So which is it? Because this is what makes the difference.
You seem to have opted for the first option in the rest of your post but never mention why.
They spent $50.5M on an ad campaign about charity, of which $0.1M was the charity itself. It's embarrassing. 50/50 might be an appropriate ratio. Even 90/10 might be defensible. 99.8/0.2 is "are you joking" territory.
Why a $100k donation is useful? Well obviously because it's good that they gave $100k... You prefer $50m of ads with 0 donation? You do you, but I prefer the former...
How about $49m in ads with $1m in donation?
Perhaps $45m in ads with $5m in donation?
Or maybe $40m in ads with $10m in donation?
You might as well do $5m in ads with $45m in donations, build a community center (or a dozen) and name it after your brand or something.
Obviously there are reasons for them choosing the split that they did, but we don't need to pretend that $100k is some upper end that cannot be surpassed.
But it was their right to choose for to split it. The conversation is about not castigating someone for charity, no matter how small. The flip side is also not touting it. Ironically, maybe Dominos would have been better off keeping their heads down and spending $0 on charity.
Here's the correction
> How about $50m in ads with $1m in donation?
> Perhaps $50m in ads with $5m in donation?
> Or maybe $50m in ads with $10m in donation?
The $50m is how many they are going to spend in ads, it's fixed. They want to reach theses eye balls, and increasing the amount donated won't increase the amount of eye balls. They are going to spend $50m in ads. They want theses minutes of airtime... donating more won't pay for more airtime (unless it become news worthy but that's a whole other level).
How is taking a second look at the amount that you'll actually donate and seeing that the proportions will generate some backlash and possibly result in negative press a bad idea to have?
I assume that the donation also comes from a particular budget allocation, which can be adjusted as necessary.
> They want to reach theses eye balls, and increasing the amount donated won't increase the amount of eye balls.
"Company A donates $10 to charity."
"Company A donates $100k to charity."
"Company A donates $1m to charity."
I doubt that each of those would result in equal amount of attention, though I'll concede that with a marketing budget like that they can probably make even $100k seem like the best thing ever to the casual observer. I'd say that there's still a certain scaling to the "newsworthiness" aspect, rather than a binary yes/no choice.
At the end of the day, it's up to them to choose how much they'll donate towards any particular initiative and how much they'll spend on popularizing this initiative, both factors having a certain impact on the effectiveness of that campaign.
Of course, without a doubt they've done analysis of this and found that $100k is the optimum amount to donate, so that they can play it up as this great initiative, without donating more than they desire, seeing as they're not obligated to. And that exact amount is what a lot of people take issue with, especially when compared to the aforementioned marketing budget.
It seems like some parody of a corporation-driven society.