Day Two: The Good News Podcast
For Day 2, Cards Against Humanity released their own short podcast series about telling you about all the good things that are happening in the world as it burns around you. A noble effort for sure, and God do we need it.
Cleverness: * *
This fits well into the theme of the promo, certainly. But I’m unsure about the medium of choice being a podcast. A) It’s hard to make room for another podcast on my feed at this point and B) the short run time of these episodes (5–10 mins max) leaves little room for much development of personalities or delving into the issues at hand, even if the issue at hand is whether or not dogs are good. There’s probably a market for people who want a little fluff in their lives though. I can see someone popping one of these on after seeing Trump tweet something stupid and feeling better.
Funnyness: * *
I listened to a couple of these and so far it’s OK. The episodes are a little all over the place and nothing catches my eye that much. Again, seems more practical than prankish.
Value: * *
According to the about page, funds from the CaHSA promotion will keep this going for a year, ad-free. After that, maybe it’ll keep going. $300K seems kinda expensive for that though.
From a customer’s perspective, I guess paying $2.50 for a year of podcasts is objectively cheap (as well as some new cards and stickers), but the value isn’t there for me, since the podcast is free for all online anyway. I know it’s not CaH’s style, but maybe having bonus episodes for subscribers only would give it that extra worth and make me feel like I missed out on something. But podcasts, like writing and music unfortunately, have just been cheapened to the point of almost negative worth because of the gosh-dang Internet.
Day Three: Cards Against Humanity Redistributes Your Wealth
YES. This, as they say, is why we bought our tickets to this show.
For Day 3, CaH took everyone’s money and redistributed it. Literally, they sent people checks. If you were lucky enough…well, let me rephrase that…if you were poor enough, you got a check for $1,000. Thousands more people received refunds for their entire purchase of $15. The rest of the people got shit because they are the 1%.
Cleverness: * * * *
This is exactly the kind of thing that only CaH could have done, and I had a big smile on my face when I read it. This is absolutely brilliant because while they could have just randomly distributed the money, they actually did their due diligence to ensure the people who received the checks were the most needy recipients by asking about income levels and collecting census data.
For the folks that needed it, this was a dream come true, and you can feel that in their stories. I couldn’t even get through them all because a lot of them are heartbreaking, but damn, it’s hard to criticize true philanthropy done in such a clever way. This is life changing money for some people, and honestly, it’s quite humbling to be reminded of that by a stupid party game.
Funnyness: * * *
I guess this isn’t laugh out loud funny, but the humor here comes from the biting satire. It not only lampooned the idea of pure wealth distribution (“Oh, you want to give away your money? Ok.”) but actually shed light on how much of a difference it would make to some, even when taken to its extreme on purpose for comedic effect.
Value: * * * *
This came out to a cost of $250,000 for CaH, which comes pretty close to our budget of $333,333 when you account for some discrepancies between days and the fact that, hey, they are just straight giving it away.
But I gave it the full 4 stars because of the value for the customer. Obviously, there is direct value if you got a check, but the value of the charity is obscene. $2.50 to basically turn a hundred people’s lives around. That’s a compelling donation and it doesn’t even have to involve a Sarah Mclaughlin song. Truly, I would have been happy to pay into this fund. But, as we all know, I forgot.
Anyway, overall this was great. A charitable cause built into a prank, surrounded by the satire that this company is known for.
Day Four: Cards Against Humanity Destroys Homework
Day Four was CaH’s real charity day, in which they teamed up with an organization and donated some money. This time, the org of choice was Donors Choose, with the cause being teachers who support homework alternatives. They matched donations up to $100,000.
Cleverness: * *
There’s not really much to say about this one. Kinda fits with the theme I guess, but it’s a bit of a stretch.
Funnyness: *
Docking points for this is like saying celery would taste better if it was purple. It doesn’t really apply or matter, but dem’s the rules I made up.
Value: * *
It appears CaH matched the donations only, but the link is already dead so I can’t see what was raised. Subscribers got a handful of goodies and some cards. Not bad, not great. So far, this whole promo still doesn’t feel too special from a customer standpoint, but maybe that’s not the point.
Part 3 coming when I feel like it!
All images owned by Cards Against Humanity.
