This ignores macroeconomics 101. If money is less plentiful/cheap (as of rising interest rates brought on by inflation), then there's less incentive to waste money on investments with questionable return prospects. This includes "investments" in PR.
The point about being able to "raise prices under the pretense of inflation" is a red herring. You know what's better than raising prices and then blowing the surplus on ads? Raising prices and pocketing it. You only spend it on frivolous projects if there's nothing better to do with it (eg. because the fed flooded the economy with dollars).
Actually macroeconomics 101 fails to fully describe the situation we're in. Market concentration (whether it's a single company having a monopoly or oligopoly, a holding company owning different "competing" firms within the same industry, or incestuous relationships created by someone being a board member for multiple companies) throw the usual you're talking about incentives out the window. The near zero interest rates we had until recently weren't so much a balancing act as much as a charity program. And speaking of the Fed, they in effect cause the "free" market to be more like a planned economy, one where those with capital can maintain access to almost limitless free money, and where they use soft power to suppress wages.
Yes, there are other pizza chains, but Domino's has almost twice the market share of its closest competitors, meaning it can waste money in an irrational way with few consequences, contrary to the rational actor and healthy competition that most models assume:
https://medium.com/edison-discovers/dominos-takes-50-of-pizz...
For years, lots of companies gorged themselves by burning money by doing stock buybacks just for the sake of pumping share prices for fleeting short term gains for executives and shareholders, while everything that makes the company actually operate is slowly hollowed out. Many of these same companies will then ask for bailouts after wasting all this money and making bad business decisions, like airlines. This example with Domino's is actually pretty mild in comparison to money wasted with things like stock buybacks and executive bonuses. Macroeconomic models also don't take bailouts into account, which are usually needed because companies make bad, irrational decisions that favor extreme short term thinking.
> "Raising prices and pocketing it"
Precisely, that's what many of these companies are doing. Whine about inflation and raise prices for consumers while simultaneously bragging about record earnings on shareholder calls, the only place in practice where they are obligated to tell the truth. If inflation was really the primary cause of price increases, you'd likely see them slashing earnings projections in line with that, but that's not happening. It's certainly a contributor, but to know if a company is telling the truth you have to look at their earnings when they're saying that.
Waste? Any press is good press and a lot of people are talking about this.
Besides, the company already allocated budget for this last year as part of their broader video budget. This commercial run just happens to be about the donation. These things are usually done by some Chief of Bullshit and Diversity Officer and the ad agency chose to highlight it to tick the “social responsibility” slot in this year’s slate of commercials.
Would you rather they spent the money on more ads of dripping cheese? Would it be ok to spend $50mm promoting it if the donation was also $50mm? What a nothingpizza.
The only thing that will change bad business practices is consumers not supporting bad business. It's obvious that regulators are willfully asleep at the wheel.
Also the online ordering infrastructure that has to be developed and maintained is run (and paid for) by corporate - not the franchisees (I assume). This makes the online ordering system essentially it's own business that must provide it's own value to get paid.
The price of the pizza goes to the restaurants, the delivery fee goes to the driver (mostly, I hope), and the "online convenience fee" goes to the business running the online ordering system. It all works out.
> the delivery fee goes to the driver (mostly, I hope)
I don't think I've ever [edit: should read "recently", I surely saw some early ones that didn't] seen one that doesn't specify that the driver doesn't get the money. Presumably because when they (most pizza delivery places do this now, plus I think Jimmy Johns does it, probably others too) first started adding those fees some years back, people assumed it was for the driver and stopped tipping, since it's usually about as much as a decent tip would be.
Ever-rising, often-sneaky (different prices for delivery, much worse coupons for delivery vs. pick-up) increases in delivery costs have me thinking like my parents used to, and rarely ordering delivery anymore. There was a golden age in the late 90s and early '00s when delivery was pretty damn cheap, basically just $3-5 for a tip. It's over.
"Convenience Fee" is a bullshit weasel term that needs to die, though. Call it "excess profit" if you like, but businesses that piss on my leg and tell me it's raining get zero sympathy, and I hope they all go bankrupt in the upcoming recession.
I strongly disagree with this. An efficient market requires that consumers have accurate information available to them in order to compare prices, just as an efficient market requires a government that prevents outright fraud.
Retail businesses spend a lot of effort manipulating the customer experience using A/B testing: they understand that there's a time and information asymmetry between business and consumer, and so they go to great lengths to withhold pertinent information so that the consumer can't compare prices before shopping. A standard technique is to advertise one price, then tack on unadvertised "fees" that only appear later in the checkout process once a consumer has invested significant time and effort into the order. An even uglier one (hey DoorDash) is to advertise a "delivery fee" up front and then later present a separate line item labeled "taxes and fees" that contains a second portion of the delivery fee (previously unadvertised and also labeled in a deceptive way.)
If you want to let businesses mislead consumers without limit, then you might as well build a society that legalizes false or fraudulent advertising entirely: that's close to what these businesses are doing here.
If you look at their daily sales, outside of days when pizza is a norm like the superbowl, I'd be surprised if they haven't decreased in many categories since they added the additional fees after the pandemic began, they have declined as a result of the increased price of delivery orders. The service fee was also in place prior to inflation surging as well, which defies logic.
It's opportunistic to charge more in this way, it's actually tacking the cost savings of coupons on at checkout, which also makes it a rather deceptive practice, whereas, the simply could have increased the cost of their pizza margins, but these days cost schemes online have become the norm on top of taxes and tips. It's a shameful business practice that not enough people call out.
It only makes sense if they are capturing analytics on lost revenue and can see that the addition earning from the fee outweigh the direct costs of abandon carts.
The loss of goodwill is a little more difficult to capture, so I can see them not knowing this cost.
As far as I am aware, every food delivery services charges a delivery fee, which is some % of total cost of the order.
As restaurants operate on thin margins, food revenue cannot provide enough money to invest in technology (you may be surprised at the number of fast food companies that have invested in CX through mobile ordering). Rather fees, like delivery fees, are used to invest in R&D.
First, my neighborhood pizza place offers free delivery. And it’s really good pizza.
Second, the price if delivery is worked into their overall prices since drivers has costs. The stupidity of Dominos charging a delivery fee is that it’s just extra on top of their prices so extra mental labor to work out true price instead of advertised price.
Third, dominos used to charge $0 for delivery even though margins were the same back then.
> First, my neighborhood pizza place offers free delivery. And it’s really good pizza.
Do they have a mobile app to order from, shows real time order status, coupons, and rewards? And, as you said in your second point, the delivery isn't free. The cost is built in to the pizza. So if you dine in, or pick up, you're paying a premium to subsidize the cost of delivery.
> Extra mental labor to work out true price instead of advertised price.
The final price is shown before checking out. This is no different than purchasing from Amazon, booking a flight on Expedia, or getting a hotel room on Booking.com.
> Third, dominos used to charge $0 for delivery even though margins were the same back then.
Yes, back before domino's had to compete against other national fast food chains' technology strategies.
How do you know margins are the same? That statement is extremely unlikely. Food prices have surged, yet Domino's Pizza still runs some of the same specials... $5.99 medium pizzas, tons of coupons, etc. Secondly, the market for delivery drivers has gotten enormously more competitive. Used to be pizza and Chinese food were the only places likely to deliver. Now GrubHub, Uber, Door dash, etc. It's just harder to find people willing to drive (oh, gas prices are higher too,maybe you've noticed) your food to you.
There’s something like that in Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon, after the explosion of a space station and ship; in a company meeting:
—⁂—
“Very well. Now the public relations report—let me call attention to the first item, gentlemen. The vice-president in charge recommends a schedule of annuities, benefits, scholarships and so forth for dependents of the staff of the power satellite and of the pilot of the Charon: see appendix ‘C’.”
A director across from Harriman—Phineas Morgan, chairman of the food trust, Cuisine, Incorporated—protested, “What is this, Ed? Too bad they were killed of course, but we paid them skyhigh wages and carried their insurance to boot. Why the charity?”
Harriman grunted. “Pay it—I so move. It’s peanuts. ‘Do not bind the mouths of the kine who tread the grain.’”
“I wouldn’t call better than nine hundred thousand ‘peanuts,’” protested Morgan.
“Just a minute, gentlemen—” It was the vice-president in charge of public relations, himself a director. “If you’ll look at the breakdown, Mr. Morgan, you will see that eighty-five percent of the appropriation will be used to publicize the gifts.”
Morgan squinted at the figures. “Oh—why didn’t you say so? Well, I suppose the gifts can be considered unavoidable overhead, but it’s a bad precedent.”
“Without them we have nothing to publicize.”
“Yes, but—”
—⁂—
(Harriman then insists on not settling with a woman who gave birth as the satellite blew up and is suing for half a million due to birth defects, saying that in the long run any compromise or settlement would be dearer than fighting it, even with possible bad publicity; and they should buy the judge if necessary.)
I greatly enjoy this story for its keen assessment of the social and business factors to such progress, through its main character Harriman. Indeed, the best science fiction does tend to contain rather a lot of social study.
I thought about this almost every I time I saw the ad. Doing a quick search there are about 6,185 Dominos restaurants in the US. Which works out to about $16 per restaurant.
I always felt it was just a marketing stunt and disingenuous of them.
Did Domino's spend an extra 50 million to brag about a 100k donation, or did Domino's have a fairly normal ad-spend year, of which 50 million focused on the donation?
While I'm generally inclined to agree with downvotes because you don't really explain your reasoning - this is a post on an openly biased subreddit (anti-work) and it doesn't source any of the information given.
It's quite openly an anti-corp hit post and it's not trying to inform readers. If it were then I wouldn't have to go research if what the poster is saying isn't completely fabricated.
Everything has bias, it's the human condition. The post does just fine informing readers and if you read the comments theres plenty more information on how Dominos exploits its workers and is just generally not for the people.
DO your research, sure. Fact checking is important. But if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck..
Sure, but "news" should inform people, not be a random screencap and a title that gives you zero indication that the facts are real. I don't think hacker news would do very well if it just posted screencaps and made bold claims leaving it to the readers to dig up any relevant information.
I think a more genuine headline would be "Domino's spent $50.4 million (and counting) on TV ads [that] brag about [their franchisees] giving local businesses a total of $100,000"
Clearly they're going to spend money on advertising anyway. And it's not unreasonable for those advertisements to include things they are proud of, such as when their franchisees support local businesses. They clearly say "Domino's franchisees" in the ad.
Moreover, I don’t know what kind of app is used in the screenshot, and the information may very well be correct, but the Reddit post is unsourced. So someone in the comments posted a link to a Metro article as source, which links to a screenshot posted on Twitter. Might as well post this HN thread on Twitter to complete the ouroboros, perhaps a news site will pick it up next…
No, they spent several times $50.4M on TV ads to promote their brand to try to increase food sales. $50.4M of that happened to be on ads that featured a $100k donation.
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.
I'm surprised people aren't getting this. The $100k is from their advertising budget (or could be).
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.
> 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.
Yeah, I agree. What the parent said is akin to saying they could have donated an extra $10 million by taking it out of their R&D budget. If they thought they could cut an extra $10 million in costs somewhere, they would. That's business. Whether they would donate that or not is a separate matter.
If 100 people in suits walk past a homeless man, and one of them hands the homeless man a $100 bill, do you berate him for only giving 500:1 his disposable income? What about the 99 who gave nothing?
It's because it was 100% their choice. It doesn't matter if they drew funds from the ad budget or the CEO's couch cushions, they could have spent the ad dollars on it even if they didn't.
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.
They are completely different categories of spending. The $100k is part of the costs to make the ad. Almost all of the rest of the $50.4M is the cost of run the ad. It's not sensible to compare them.
What you say is correct from al the perspective of advertising and corporate budgeting. From the perspective of charitable work, which they invited by loudly proclaiming "look at our charity", it is appalling.
IMHO most charity work is kind of scam anyways. Sure you've got some proportion really out there doing good and helping desperate people, but most of them seem like ego trips and tax scams for rich people. In most cases, at least in democratic nations, I think it would be in our interest to take all that money and give it local and national governments to fully fund education, social services, environment causes, animal control, healthcare, etc. By letting charities handle large chunks of those, we essentially allow rich people to dictate public policy.
The problem is that corruption is widespread throughout most of the world, and especially places in poverty. A stable, just society is able to bootstrap into relative wealthy pretty quickly, so most of the countries that have the largest need of aid, also tend to have the greatest issues with government trustworthiness.
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.
Some say that giving money to marketing companies, and the people they employ, is a bit of charity, for what other function could those people possibly serve in society?
Ironically enough, the most effective charities often have significant marketing budgets. You can't do any work if you don't have any money to do it with.
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.
Why is it appalling? Would people prefer the charity get $0 and the advertisers get $50.1M? Or the shareholders get an extra $0.1M?
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.
I can't tell if this comment is real or parody. If it's real, and you really don't understand the point, ask yourself why a $100k donation would be useful addition to a TV commercial.
The $50m is there whether the donation happens or not... it's their advertising budget, they are going to spend it, they advertise their brands...
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...
> 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.
> 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.
That's the thing you fail to understands, your math is wrong.
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).
> The $50m is how many they are going to spend in ads, it's fixed.
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.
and the source for this is a link to an anti-work subreddit whose post content is a screencap and a title that doesn't source the $50MM ad budget?
How is this making the front page? I'm not claiming any of this is incorrect, but I am saying based on the submission I have nothing but some random posters word (on a biased sub) as the source.
This is sort of the opposite, maybe... of better to be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.
Better to donate money silently, than to open one's mouth and show how poorly you spend your money.
Or something like that. I vowed, long ago, that if I ever ran a company successful enough to be able to donate large sums of money, that it would simply be done quietly, and only ever mentioned in ways that it made sense. I.e. if it were a board meeting, cool, mention it. The entrance to the building in the lobby? Cool, mention it. But in my mind, donations are not meant to be bragged about, it's a civil service, not marketing.
Not really. Surely a megacorp like dominos would get better rates (because of negotiating power/buying in bulk) than buying at spot prices on some self service website?
It's like saying Subway spent a billion dollars to promote how one guy bought $10K worth of sandwiches over 10 years. Like, yeah, that's a technically accurate description of the Jared from Subway campaign but the actual example is meant to stand in for a larger message.
Same with Dominoes, they obviously spent more than $100K in charity over the entire year, they are using 1 $100K campaign as a standin for all the other charitable stuff they did because it's a much more compelling ad than just a spreadsheet scrolling for 30 seconds.
It's not like ALL of you judging things right now don't even donate .2% of your shit away either. (Yes I know some of you donate really well but the vast majority of judgers right now - don't)
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadThe point about being able to "raise prices under the pretense of inflation" is a red herring. You know what's better than raising prices and then blowing the surplus on ads? Raising prices and pocketing it. You only spend it on frivolous projects if there's nothing better to do with it (eg. because the fed flooded the economy with dollars).
Yes, there are other pizza chains, but Domino's has almost twice the market share of its closest competitors, meaning it can waste money in an irrational way with few consequences, contrary to the rational actor and healthy competition that most models assume: https://medium.com/edison-discovers/dominos-takes-50-of-pizz...
This is a good deep dive into these sorts of dynamics: https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Republic-Walmart-Corporations...
For years, lots of companies gorged themselves by burning money by doing stock buybacks just for the sake of pumping share prices for fleeting short term gains for executives and shareholders, while everything that makes the company actually operate is slowly hollowed out. Many of these same companies will then ask for bailouts after wasting all this money and making bad business decisions, like airlines. This example with Domino's is actually pretty mild in comparison to money wasted with things like stock buybacks and executive bonuses. Macroeconomic models also don't take bailouts into account, which are usually needed because companies make bad, irrational decisions that favor extreme short term thinking.
> "Raising prices and pocketing it"
Precisely, that's what many of these companies are doing. Whine about inflation and raise prices for consumers while simultaneously bragging about record earnings on shareholder calls, the only place in practice where they are obligated to tell the truth. If inflation was really the primary cause of price increases, you'd likely see them slashing earnings projections in line with that, but that's not happening. It's certainly a contributor, but to know if a company is telling the truth you have to look at their earnings when they're saying that.
Besides, the company already allocated budget for this last year as part of their broader video budget. This commercial run just happens to be about the donation. These things are usually done by some Chief of Bullshit and Diversity Officer and the ad agency chose to highlight it to tick the “social responsibility” slot in this year’s slate of commercials.
Would you rather they spent the money on more ads of dripping cheese? Would it be ok to spend $50mm promoting it if the donation was also $50mm? What a nothingpizza.
Tell that to Peloton.
So many business related things simply don't make sense any more.
The price of the pizza goes to the restaurants, the delivery fee goes to the driver (mostly, I hope), and the "online convenience fee" goes to the business running the online ordering system. It all works out.
I don't think I've ever [edit: should read "recently", I surely saw some early ones that didn't] seen one that doesn't specify that the driver doesn't get the money. Presumably because when they (most pizza delivery places do this now, plus I think Jimmy Johns does it, probably others too) first started adding those fees some years back, people assumed it was for the driver and stopped tipping, since it's usually about as much as a decent tip would be.
Ever-rising, often-sneaky (different prices for delivery, much worse coupons for delivery vs. pick-up) increases in delivery costs have me thinking like my parents used to, and rarely ordering delivery anymore. There was a golden age in the late 90s and early '00s when delivery was pretty damn cheap, basically just $3-5 for a tip. It's over.
Retail businesses spend a lot of effort manipulating the customer experience using A/B testing: they understand that there's a time and information asymmetry between business and consumer, and so they go to great lengths to withhold pertinent information so that the consumer can't compare prices before shopping. A standard technique is to advertise one price, then tack on unadvertised "fees" that only appear later in the checkout process once a consumer has invested significant time and effort into the order. An even uglier one (hey DoorDash) is to advertise a "delivery fee" up front and then later present a separate line item labeled "taxes and fees" that contains a second portion of the delivery fee (previously unadvertised and also labeled in a deceptive way.)
If you want to let businesses mislead consumers without limit, then you might as well build a society that legalizes false or fraudulent advertising entirely: that's close to what these businesses are doing here.
It's opportunistic to charge more in this way, it's actually tacking the cost savings of coupons on at checkout, which also makes it a rather deceptive practice, whereas, the simply could have increased the cost of their pizza margins, but these days cost schemes online have become the norm on top of taxes and tips. It's a shameful business practice that not enough people call out.
The loss of goodwill is a little more difficult to capture, so I can see them not knowing this cost.
As restaurants operate on thin margins, food revenue cannot provide enough money to invest in technology (you may be surprised at the number of fast food companies that have invested in CX through mobile ordering). Rather fees, like delivery fees, are used to invest in R&D.
Second, the price if delivery is worked into their overall prices since drivers has costs. The stupidity of Dominos charging a delivery fee is that it’s just extra on top of their prices so extra mental labor to work out true price instead of advertised price.
Third, dominos used to charge $0 for delivery even though margins were the same back then.
Do they have a mobile app to order from, shows real time order status, coupons, and rewards? And, as you said in your second point, the delivery isn't free. The cost is built in to the pizza. So if you dine in, or pick up, you're paying a premium to subsidize the cost of delivery.
> Extra mental labor to work out true price instead of advertised price.
The final price is shown before checking out. This is no different than purchasing from Amazon, booking a flight on Expedia, or getting a hotel room on Booking.com.
> Third, dominos used to charge $0 for delivery even though margins were the same back then.
Yes, back before domino's had to compete against other national fast food chains' technology strategies.
—⁂—
“Very well. Now the public relations report—let me call attention to the first item, gentlemen. The vice-president in charge recommends a schedule of annuities, benefits, scholarships and so forth for dependents of the staff of the power satellite and of the pilot of the Charon: see appendix ‘C’.”
A director across from Harriman—Phineas Morgan, chairman of the food trust, Cuisine, Incorporated—protested, “What is this, Ed? Too bad they were killed of course, but we paid them skyhigh wages and carried their insurance to boot. Why the charity?”
Harriman grunted. “Pay it—I so move. It’s peanuts. ‘Do not bind the mouths of the kine who tread the grain.’”
“I wouldn’t call better than nine hundred thousand ‘peanuts,’” protested Morgan.
“Just a minute, gentlemen—” It was the vice-president in charge of public relations, himself a director. “If you’ll look at the breakdown, Mr. Morgan, you will see that eighty-five percent of the appropriation will be used to publicize the gifts.”
Morgan squinted at the figures. “Oh—why didn’t you say so? Well, I suppose the gifts can be considered unavoidable overhead, but it’s a bad precedent.”
“Without them we have nothing to publicize.”
“Yes, but—”
—⁂—
(Harriman then insists on not settling with a woman who gave birth as the satellite blew up and is suing for half a million due to birth defects, saying that in the long run any compromise or settlement would be dearer than fighting it, even with possible bad publicity; and they should buy the judge if necessary.)
I greatly enjoy this story for its keen assessment of the social and business factors to such progress, through its main character Harriman. Indeed, the best science fiction does tend to contain rather a lot of social study.
I always felt it was just a marketing stunt and disingenuous of them.
It's better to just skip it and move on.
It's quite openly an anti-corp hit post and it's not trying to inform readers. If it were then I wouldn't have to go research if what the poster is saying isn't completely fabricated.
DO your research, sure. Fact checking is important. But if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck..
spending $50m on ads while bragging how much they help local businesses
it’s just on another level
Clearly they're going to spend money on advertising anyway. And it's not unreasonable for those advertisements to include things they are proud of, such as when their franchisees support local businesses. They clearly say "Domino's franchisees" in the ad.
This is why I don't trust XKCD as a primary source: No edit history or permalinks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How is this making the front page? I'm not claiming any of this is incorrect, but I am saying based on the submission I have nothing but some random posters word (on a biased sub) as the source.
a lot of HN’s are biased against advertising industry
Better to donate money silently, than to open one's mouth and show how poorly you spend your money.
Or something like that. I vowed, long ago, that if I ever ran a company successful enough to be able to donate large sums of money, that it would simply be done quietly, and only ever mentioned in ways that it made sense. I.e. if it were a board meeting, cool, mention it. The entrance to the building in the lobby? Cool, mention it. But in my mind, donations are not meant to be bragged about, it's a civil service, not marketing.
Same with Dominoes, they obviously spent more than $100K in charity over the entire year, they are using 1 $100K campaign as a standin for all the other charitable stuff they did because it's a much more compelling ad than just a spreadsheet scrolling for 30 seconds.