An advertising agency campaign that used homeless people as Internet hotspots has drawn a swift an angry reaction from critics.
The Homeless Hotspots campaign, created by Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s BHH Labs, used homeless people
from Austin Texas shelters to provide access to a 4G network in exchange for a suggested donation of $2 per 15 minutes, CBSNews.com reported March 12 in its Tech Talk blog.
The 13 homeless people chosen to participate in the program included a man identified as Clarence from New Orleans, who said he lost his house to Hurricane Katrina, and another named Jeffrey from Pittsburgh who was re- portedly treated for traumatic brain injury. They were asked to roam the streets of Austin in T-shirts printed with the slogan “I am a 4G hotspot.”
The campaign was launched at the South by Southwest film, music and inter- active festival being
held this month in Austin, Texas. In a March 6 blogpost, offi- cials at BBH Labs compared the
Homeless Hotspots model with street newspapers, like San Francisco’s Street Sheet or NewYork City’s Street News, which serve to advocate the plight of homeless people by enabling them to work.
Many critics of the campaign did not agree.
“The digital divide has never hit us over the head with a more blunt display of un-selfconscious gall,” ReadWriteWeb’s Jon Mitchell, told CB- SNews.com. Mitchell cited Content Magazine editor Erin Kissane’s tweet, “Last thought before sleeping: the difference between ‘I’m running a hotspot’ and ‘I am a hotspot’ is a difference that matters.”
In a later statement, the BBH Labs seemed to acknowledge important dif- ferences between street
newspapers and the Homeless Hotspots campaign. “The biggest criticism (which we agree with actually) is that Street Newspapers allow for content creation by the homeless (we encourage those to research this a bit more as it cer- tainly does not work exactly as you would assume),” the BBH Labs said in a statement.
