"Strategic philanthropy"

So, on the way home today, I was listening to this discussion about the notion of strategic philanthropy, where, essentially, a marketing guy was talking about how corporations aligning themselves with various charitable issues causes a 'win-win' situation for everyone involved (gag, gag, oops, sorry, hard to control the reflex to throw up), such as CIBC aligning themselves with the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, in order to help them sell as many useless pink appliances and housewares as possible, for what appears to be (for all intents and purposes) lots of marketing hype and money-making, but not much from the actual results point of view.
Several of the counterpoints, I thought, brought up some poignant issues, but were quickly glossed and brushed over. One brought up the issue that hawking product, absolutely unrelated to the charitable cause, was not, in fact, philanthropy at all (seriously; what does a KitchenAid mixer have to do with breast cancer? Furthermore, what does a pink hockeystick have to do with breast cancer?). It is simply 'doing good' to 'look good', and makes profit the ultimate motive.
Another brought up the point that, in corporations controlling who gets corporate exposure and support, individual citizens have very little to no idea who or what their money (funnelled through the corporation, of course) goes to, whether it's effective and whether real change occurs. If one buys a Red Motorola phone, or a Red American Express card, how does one really know that means some mother in Tanzania is going to get her anti-viral drugs? (Of course, one of the most famous blunders was by Radiohead in their pathetically crappy efforts to reduce their carbon footprint; they claimed that they had paid for groves and groves of mango trees to be planted in the vague area of "Africa" to carbon offset their last world tour, yet, when follow up was done by a journalist, very few to none of these trees had been planted, and of those that were indeed planted, most of them died and were not replaced. Radiohead then sent out a statement saying it wasn't their responsibility to ensure that their mango trees were planted, which then begs the question: Whose was it??).
Yet another brought up the point that "unsexy" charities (such as for homeless people vs. upper class overweight women with breast cancer, malaria vs. HIV and chronic care elderly/mentally challenged vs. those darn 'cute' children from Sick Kids') are forgotten and waylaid in order to make room for the trendier and sexier issues. This, of course, results in the weaker, the lowlier and the humbler issues, even though equally meritous, to be ignored and alienated further from the mainstream.
Bah. That really irked me today. It would be really pleasant for me if people would just think more about issues.