Larry King recently interviewed Bono about his new Red product line.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)LARRY KING, CNN HOST (voice-over): Tonight, Bono, he’s hanging out with the president on Air Force One and joining Oprah for a major shopping spree. Why do world leaders, even the pope, make time to see this Irish rock star? How come he gets more serious stuff done than a lot of politicians?
Bono is here with Bobby Shriver. They’re men with an urgent global mission and they’re aiming to save millions of lives and you can help; Bono, next on LARRY KING LIVE.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: Good evening and welcome to what we consider a very special edition of LARRY KING LIVE, our special guests, both in New York, are Bono, the acclaimed musician, lead singer for U2, global philanthropist and activist, co-creator of Product RED.
It’s a groundbreaking initiative designed to bring new money into the global fund and help fight AIDS in Africa; and joining him is Bobby Shriver, who created the Product RED campaign with Bono. He and Bono also co-founded DATA, Debt, AIDS, Trade and Africa.
Bono, what got you interested particularly in this project?
BONO, CO-FOUNDER (RED) CAMPAIGN AND DATA: Well, you know, with Bobby we’ve been, you know, banging (INAUDIBLE) and tramping the corridors of, you know Congress and the capitals around the world on extreme poverty issues. But we were realizing that all the work that we’re doing there, all the development stuff can be undone by this tiny little virus, HIV/AIDS.
It is shocking to think that it’s 5,000 Africans are dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease. That’s like two twin towers a day or a tsunami every month and they’re dying because they can’t get the drugs we can get in any corner store. So, we were trying to figure out a way of raising money for the global fund, which gets the drugs to the people in Africa who don’t have them.
And, also we’re trying to — how do we create heat in the shopping malls? I mean we’ve got the churches and the student activists with the one campaign. There’s two and a half million American have signed up for that. But how do you get to where people are where they live and how do you get — how do you access the firepower of corporate America and the creative genius in their marketing departments? So, that’s where Product RED started.
