Starbucks & Facebook - World Takeover

Christmas Sing Along
From tomorrow Facebook members in 16 countries including the UK and US will be served ads for a Starbucks (RED) charity singalong of The Beatles 'All You Need Is Love' when they log in. Read the article on Brand Republic.

To celebrate the Starbucks partnership with (RED), the charity fighting Aids in Africa, they will create the largest global ad campaign on Facebook to date. The intention is to raise awareness, but you couldn't be blamed for buying one of those new Christmas coffees they will be selling after seeing the Starbucks logo.
Musicians from all over the world will perform the song simultaneously, which will be streamed to the website. They could have taken a page out of Louis Vuitton's book and live streamed a performance onto the Facebook site, rather than individual filming, but then I assume it's hard to get so many musicians together in the same room for charity unless it's for Live Aid...
They are still attempting to get the audience involved, which at this time is a must have for any campaign, by allowing anyone with access to the site and a video camera, which is pretty much everyone in this day and age, to contribute their own version of the song. How many will be willing? Many students and wannabe singers I'm sure, it's not very easy for people to be embarrassed these days, and if you think they should be, they're probably joking.
At the end of the campaign, Starbucks will make a donation to the Global Fund.
Starbucks (RED) website.

To also aid the fund, Starbucks will be selling new products branded with the (RED) campaign, but their contribution is very much like a stingy global company.
The Starbucks (RED) range:
(STARBUCKS) RED Blend Coffee by Starbucks Coffee, $11.95, $1 donated to (RED)
(STARBUCKS) RED Double Walled Stainless Steel Water Bottle by Starbucks Coffee, $19.95, $1 donated to (RED)
(STARBUCKS) RED Soft Touch Tumbler by Starbucks Coffee, $15.95, $1 donated to (RED).

I wonder how many people buy these products, and whether the price has been put up just to add a donation. For the price of the products, which you could buy for less than $5 elsewhere, really aren't donating much at all. Let's hope their final donation to the Global Fund will be significantly larger than the profits they would make from selling the above products.

They do have a little deal on their loyalty card, where every time you spend using your card, a 5¢ US contribution will be made until the end of December next year. Over time, I believe this is where they will gain their largest contribution, and so they should, if they really have the intentions of the charity behind this publicity, promote the loyalty card to Facebook fans.

It's interesting to see how they promote themselves for a charity, and how they are using the same applications becoming more commonly used with the younger public, for example Facebook and something similar to YouTube.