While walking by a billboard of a large tech company, I noticed that underneath that billboard, sat several encampments. I start to wonder what the point of the ad is. I see them plastered everywhere in the city - it’s not like someone is going to miss the company. More generally, I wondered how relevant that company was in the community it was advertising in.
Why not take the marketing budget and reallocate it to funding microloans to start businesses, help pay utility bills or rent, etc.?
“Here’s $10,000 from Coca-Cola to help keep the lights on”
With microloans, there’s also the promise of getting back some of the money that’s loaned out plus interest. On top of that, there’s great publicity for creating a program like this - although, the first company to do this will take the lion share of the goodwill.
I’ve largely felt microloans as a concept have only recently gained serious attention in North America, although mostly from crowd-sourced apps and not entrenched banks.
[TODO - talk about future of microloans, what’s needed to get NA there (legislation, partners, etc.)]
I think advertising itself can be reframed more abstractly - what is advertising? Why limit it to microloans?