SXSW tech conference: Homeless Hotspots campaign sparks outrage

There is an old adage among marketers that there is no such thing as bad publicity, but two recent tech-driven controversies, the Kony 2012 campaign and the Homeless Hotspots project at the South by Southwest conference in the US, raise questions about the cliche. Both campaigns succeeded in getting people talking but not necessarily about the issues they were trying to raise. South by Southwest, known as SXSW, has risen over the last few years to become one of the most important tech conferences in the US. Twitter had its coming out at SXSW in 2007. This year there was no big breakout launch. Instead, the headlines about SXSW were dominated by a campaign to raise awareness about and put some money into the pockets of the homeless. It definitely raised awareness, but the campaign was also criticised for objectifying the people it was trying to make visible. [caption id=“attachment_244422” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“asdasdasd”]  [/caption] During the conference, 13 men and 1 women from a local homeless shelter walked around the streets near the conference wearing T-shirts that listed their name and a short code needed to gain access to a super-fast 4G mobile hotspot. Users were asked, but not required, to pay $2 for 15 minutes of access. The money would then be paid directly to the person wearing the shirt. The project was conceived of by BBH Labs, which was described in Wired as the “skunkworks of marketing firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty”. In the US, homeless people often make money by selling newspapers, which they often write for as well as sell. However, as more Americans turn to digital media rather than print publications, BBH said the concept of the street newspaper needed a 21st century update. Patrick Jones of Buzz:60 summed up the controversy and summed up the outrage many felt about the project in a brief video. “Sure money makes the world go round. But is it worth being treated like a transmission tower?”

Tech commentators objected to the language of the T-shirts, which said, “I’m Clarence (one of the participants) a 4G hotspot.” Jon Mitchell of ReadWriteWeb blasted the project, saying it turned the homeless people into “helpless pieces of privilege-extending infrastructure”. Not all tech commentators were completely critical of the project. Megan Garber of The Atlantic said: “It’s easy to mock Homeless Hotspots; it’s easy to disdain it; but, really, what would we prefer, the typical combination of ignoring and ignorance that we reserve for most of our dealings with the hundreds of thousands of people who are homeless in the US?” BBH pushed back saying that critics hadn’t spoken with the homeless participants. Indeed Garber of The Atlantic pointed out that most of the outrage came from “the side of the privileged” not the participants. Interviewed by the local media, participant Dusty White said that he was happy to have some work and also happy to be able to “share his story with others”. He also said that the company could have hired anyone for the job but instead chose homeless people. It is too early to tell whether this has a long-term positive impact for the participants. If one of the goals was to raise awareness about homelessness, it definitely got people talking. However, most of the debate was about the project rather than the issue of homelessness, a perennial problem in the US only exacerbated by the troubled American economy. Before the Homeless Hotspots controversy, the Kony 2012 video was trying to raise awareness about Joseph Kony, the fugitive leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army militia. The video went viral with the help of supportive tweets from Justin Bieber and Oprah Winfrey, but both the video and the group behind it, Invisible Children, were heavily criticised . Invisible Children and its leader became the focus of the story rather than Kony and the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Many of the issues critics had with Kony 2012 were different than with the Homeless Hotspots scheme, but in addition to criticisms of the campaign and its organisers, many wondered if there weren’t broader issues involving how important issues break through the noise and rouse people to action. Regarding the Homeless Hotspots project, Laura June of tech site The Verge spoke of her own discomfort with the problem of homelessness and said:

“It seems, however, to be a basic truth about our advertising-driven society that in order to raise awareness of serious issues, we sometimes have to verge on exploitation, often sadly for commercial gain.”

Raising awareness about issues that make us uncomfortable is going to get a strong response. It reminds us that there are serious issues, not just far away, but often closer to home. Do you think the Homeless Hotspots programme exploited the people it was intended to help? Do you think that to deal with important issues such as those with the Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa and homelessness in the US, that sometime we have to be made to feel uncomfortable?