Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Children's Hospitals Selling Out for Peanuts in Misguided Slices For Smiles Eat Pizza Campaign

Have you heard of Slices for Smiles?

It's the Pizza Pizza partnership with children's hospitals and their Foundations that literally raises money by means of selling pepperoni pizzas. The flyer posted up above (which arrived in my mailbox a few days ago) reports the partnership includes the Children's Miracle Network, SickKids Foundation, Raising Hope Children's Health Foundation, the CHEO Foundation and the McMaster Children's Hospital.

As I've blogged about before, associating Pizza Pizza with fundraising helps to elevate Pizza Pizza's brand a number of ways: The insanely low prices for pizza coupled with children and charity drive customer loyalty and increase frequency of fast food consumption, while the explicit provision of support for fast food's purchase by children's hospitals furthers the normalization its consumption which in turn help to drive the ever increasing pace of diet and weight related diseases in kids. Moreover the tie in with such an incredibly heart felt charity generates an emotional feeling that gets bound to Pizza Pizza's brand.

So do the hospitals at least make a killing by selling the seeds of illness?

Doesn't look that way.

According to Pizza Pizza's Slices for Smiles Foundation homepage since 2007 the campaign has raised $1,000,000.

That's $1,000,000 over 6 years split up at least 5 ways.

That's $33,333 a year each.

An unbelievable bargain for Pizza Pizza (remember too, they're donating "a portion of proceeds" from their sales - this isn't straight philanthropy).

An incredible sell out of the kids these hospitals and Foundations are supposed to protect and champion.