Post date: Sep 20, 2012 6:16:53 PM
The 48-year-old chairman of Benetton Group launched the family business's latest "UNHATE" advertising campaign on Tuesday, highlighting the plight of unemployed people under 30 who are striving to find meaningful work every day.
Benetton believes the generation appearing in a market-place where the old economic models are not providing them with the kinds of opportunities that kept their fathers in work for decades need to be tapped for ideas.
Alessandro Benetton is on a mission to find a cure for the ailing global economy and he's asking 100 million or so jobless young people to chip in with ideas.
BENETTON - Alessandro Benetton is on a mission to find a cure for the ailing global economy and he's asking 100 million or so jobless young people to chip in with ideas.
"In this case there will be a contest. It will be a contest done on the web, where these young people, 19-30 which is 100 million people, can subscribe and be entitled to either propose a project, which can be an entrepreneurial project, a project for the society, for the country, town," the slender scion of one of s best known family retail brands told Reuters.
The ads and video which show determined young people at protests, in work attire waiting for interviews or at the unemployment office are bound to be less controversial than Benetton's last campaign.
That resulted in the company agreeing in May to make a donation to a Catholic charity to end a legal dispute with the Vatican over an advertisement that showed Pope Benedict kissing an imam on the lips.
The latest global campaign will consist of posters, t-shirts, a film and a contest to choose 100 "unemployees of the year" who will each receive 5,000 euros ($6,600) for their pet projects.
Contestants must be between 18 and 30 years old and unemployed. They must submit their story and project idea to www.unhatefoundation.org and will be chosen by an online poll of their peers on the same site.
Benetton said he believes the post World War Two economic model of growth based on a relentless rise in Gross National Product (GNP) to deliver prosperity has been rendered obsolete by the rapid-fire changes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries with the explosion in computer power and the Internet.
"It's a tiny thing, I don't pretend we can change the world. I don't pretend we can do anything. But if one day I find out that other companies do something practical like we do I will be happy," he added.
Benetton said the campaign was inspired both by a team of 50 Benetton experts who presented him statistics showing that more than 100 million people between the ages of 15 and 29 were unemployed around the world.