First, could I make one point that I think is relevant? Here's a book called Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World. It's not about my company; it's about brand aid. It's highly critical of Product Red and the global fund. I'd highly recommend it to everybody who's interested in this debate and this issue.
I can answer your questions now. The kind of problems we face in developing nations, especially Haiti, with regard to infrastructure are very complex and don't seem to be improving. With infrastructure that helps producers, especially small producers, get their products to market, you face several obstacles, from no road for getting get your product into the capital and to the airport, to regulatory practices that simply make it so complicated to export product that an artisan or a small producer in a country like this wouldn't even attempt it on their own.
Brandaid Project sees a business opportunity here to partner with small producers in developing countries and to give them the kinds of resources and know-how and savvy of the global market that they simply don't have. That partnership works very well.
One assumption we made that I think we have to revisit is that, after a year or two of this, of course they'll know how to do this themselves. The great example of fantasy thinking was that when the Internet came along and e-commerce, this would automatically transform the global economy of small producers. They would all become their own marketers; they would all have access to global markets. Nothing like this happened.
The IDRC, the International Development Research Centre, did a landmark study a number of years ago on e-commerce and its effect on small producers. It concluded that less than 5% of market potential for small producers had been reached in the e-commerce revolution. It's an intricate subject but it speaks to the need for professional branding and marketing.
Last year, $500 billion was spent on advertising globally—just on advertising, not including marketing. To give you an idea of how big that is, in a good year, maybe $35 billion is spent on making movies, and we know how big an industry that is. Advertising creates a kind of soup that we don't even understand. It's like explaining water to fish. We're in it so much that we can't even acknowledge its presence. The vast majority of small producers in developing nations are completely excluded from this necessity, if they want to sell into the global market.
Brandaid Project came into existence based on two very solid beliefs. One is that global poverty is a business opportunity. For some people it can be a moral obligation to display their charitable nature, but it's really a business opportunity. Properly approached it can make money for business, including small, medium, large, and multinational businesses. The other very strong belief of Brandaid is that to solve infrastructure problems—all of these problems—takes business. Business is invented to create prosperity where poverty used to be, and only business can do this.
I don't know if that helps.