Blood money

Attracted, perhaps, by the scent of warm millennial bikers, a Red Cross bloodmobile idled bright and early this morning outside the Swamp Rabbit Cafe & Grocery, “Please give blood” writ large close by the venerable brand.

But give? Does International Paper ask anyone to give it trees? Does it paint “Please give pulp” on the sides of its logging trucks? Of course not. Because that would be absurd.

Yet for some reason it isn’t absurd for proxies of a $3 trillion community of commercial enterprises to ask potential customers of those enterprises to give them a raw material essential to their bottom lines.

At long last, Mr. McCarthy …

Whatever the organization’s history, whatever good it might do or might have done, The American Red Cross operates year-round as a giant mining operation for the same healthcare industry that bankrupts over half a million people in this country every year. The fact that it’s able to do this not only with impunity, but with the heartfelt gratitude of its donors, is enough to make a man quail before the sheer awesomeness of Madison Avenue.

So let’s hear it for BBDO Worldwide, dear readers. Not ringing a bell? Tut tut. They’re the folks whose campaigns feather nests in our hearts for such household names as M&Ms, Snickers, Mars Bars, Mountain Dew, Dunkin’ Doughnuts, and, since becoming its “creative agency of record” in 2011, The American Red Cross. And please rest assured that any irony you might detect in this grouping is nothing but a low blood sugar-induced hallucination.