Sunday with Lubach has transferred 283,926 euros to the Red Cross after a playful T-shirt campaign earlier this year, reports a producer of the program on Twitter. Met that action The VPRO program poked fun at the online platform Rumag, which also said it would raise money for the Red Cross with a T-shirt campaign.
Rumag sold a T-shirt with the imprint ‘I.believe.in.you.and.mij’ for 24.95 euros, a text from the song Evening from Boudewijn de Groot. The platform promised that part of the sales would go to the Red Cross, but the magazine Quote calculated that Rumag himself also earned between 35,000 and 55,000 euros.
Furthermore, the TV program accused Rumag of plagiarism, because Rumag would copy funny and striking (English) texts from other websites, translate and use them commercially.
Commas instead of periods
The makers of Sunday with Lubach came up with their own (cheaper) shirt with exactly the same text, only the periods in the sentence were replaced by commas (‘I, believe, in, you, and, me’). The program promised that all proceeds from the T-shirt campaign would go to the Red Cross.
Because of the fuss Rumag’s CEO, Thijs van der Heide, left a few days after the broadcast. The platform initially said it does not identify with the claims of Sunday with Lubach.
Two weeks ago presenter Arjen Lubach announced that Sunday with Lubach is going to stop. He thinks there are only a limited number of topics that lend themselves to “twenty minutes of anger and indignation.”
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