So sunday was the Super Bowl, just declared by ESPN to be the most watched TV show EVER. The main event (if you weren't aware) was all of the commercials in between the actual game, as a cost of approximately $3.1 million dollars per 30-second spot was spent on each commercial. By my best guesses, there were about 60 commercials, totaling the outrageous sum of $186 million dollars spent on trying to sell the American public some kind of product. One hundred and eighty-six million dollars. 1 8 6 0 0 0 0 0 0. (that's nine figures; that's a lot).
If there are 60 companies willing to throw away $3.1 million trying to get your attention for 30 seconds, fine. What just kills me is this...
ONE.org tells me there are approximately one billion (1,000,000,000) undernourished individuals in the world today. As one example, Ethiopia alone has 100,000 severely malnourished children. That's children alone, and only counting the ones who qualify as severely malnourished.
To put that in perspective, the $186,000,000 spent on advertising could be divided up to equal a contribution of $1860 per child. That's an astronomical sum considering current living conditions in Ethiopia. Another way to look at it would be giving each of these severely malnourished children a portion of lifesaving nutrient-dense food every single day for over five years. 100,000 people could be fed for five years.
If not Ethiopia, then 186,000,000 of the world's hungry could be given food for a day.
Or, if not food, disease prevention. At a contribution of 50 cents per person, 372,000,000 individuals could be protected against all seven Neglected Tropical Diseases (including things like bacterial and fungal infections), coverage that would last them an entire year. That's over a third (37%) of the entire world's current need. Check out this post on ONE, or this website (see comments) from an organization dedicated to eradicating NTDs.
I could keep going with all of this for awhile, but I think that'll do. With approximately 106,000,000 million viewers of the Super Bowl, an average of $1.75 was spent on each person, all to moderately entertain Americans for about 30 minutes total. Kind of ridiculous, no?
Oh, and let's not forget, this is for the 2010 Super Bowl alone.
Love, Jennifer
PS (Feb 9)... Corrected a couple of my facts. In my rush to make sense of a whole lot of information gathered from various sources I made a couple small mistakes. Fixed.
PS (Feb 9)... Corrected a couple of my facts. In my rush to make sense of a whole lot of information gathered from various sources I made a couple small mistakes. Fixed.
5 comments:
Jennifer,
Thank you for writing about the work we and our partners are doing to reduce the burden of a group of parasitic diseases collectively known as the neglected tropical diseases (NTDs).
Please have a closer look at what we are doing. For 50 cents per person we can treat an individual for 7 NTDs using drugs, not vaccines as you mentioned. Please have a look at the fantastic video the Global Network produced http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL5TLsximG0
If you are interested to hear more about our work please contact us at development.sci@imperial.ac.uk
Good Luck!
Thank you. This is what my heart screams every day. Oh, how I love you. I can't wait to travel with you.
SCI: I'm incredibly surprised but honored you somehow stumbled upon my blog. Thanks for the comment though; I hope to at least raise awareness about things such as NTDs that most people have never even heard of.
Morgan: I love you at least twice as much. And I thought about you the entire time I was writing this.
...But it's those ads that is keeping our economy from completely bottoming out. The more money we spend, the more money is being put to create jobs and whatnot. Yes, I agree that it is a crazy amount of money... but there is good in it.
the more money we spend on the shit they're selling us....soda, doritos, whatever, the more the obesity epidemic will be propagated. maybe the economy will be helped along, but at the expense of us wasting our money on things that are not only useless, but eventually harmful to our health as well--which will end up costing every single person, whether healthy or not, a ton of money on trying to battle what we did to ourselves. rather than spending the money on at least attempting to solve even a fraction of our world's problems, we're just feeding more into the machine.
Post a Comment