A source: https://web.archive.org/web/20070624105650/http://www.africo...

$100 million on marketing and billboards etc. $18 million actually raised. That was 2007.

That article got the numbers backward (or more likely, they used the $100M as shock value, not caring about providing facts). In other words, that $100M was never spent by (RED). On the contrary, it's an estimate of the advertising value that they would have needed, if they had bought themselves all the publicity that their campaign got. See how it's backwards?

Was bad journalism. You can simply look at their 990 form https://www.one.org/us/about/financials/

Non-profits must have open data showing how their money was spent.

> The collective marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola for the Red campaign has been enormous, with some estimates as high as $100 million.

Even ignoring the weasely "some estimates", that's counting advertising by these companies. They advertise mostly to increase their own sales. That budget was never available to charity.

You can see this claim, their response, and a full breakdown of their donations on the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Red