Breast cancer awareness campaigns have received a lot of talk as their cause-related marketing campaigns recently have become more sensitive and, in some senses, controversial. Susan G. Komen for the Cure (a.k.a. "Komen"), the world's largest breast cancer charity, has spent over $1.5 billion in its lifetime on research, education, and health services. The above ad is an artifact from a 2007 Komen marketing campaign, and encourages its audience to view breast cancer in a much more aggressive way compared to other campaigns.
The general layout of this ad isn't much different from Komen's normal. The focus of their breast cancer awareness ads are often centered around the chest, or objects that resemble the shape of a woman's chest. This ad differs, however, in it's lack of color and the tone it sets. Breast cancer awareness ads are typically dominated by pink color schemes, directly connecting with its female audience. What seems to best represent an ideology, though, is the text of the ad. The words covering the front of the ad model's shirt read, "When we get our hands on breast cancer, we're going to PUNCH IT, STRANGLE IT, KICK IT, SPIT ON IT, CHOKE IT, AND PUMMEL IT UNTIL IT'S GOOD AND DEAD. Not just horror movie dead, but really, truly dead. And then we're going to tie a pink ribbon on it." The all-caps words indicate the text in the ad that stand out the most through all-caps and bold font.
This ad seems pretty violent for an advertising campaign that concentrates on womanhood, and maintaining that womanhood throughout the battle and hopeful defeat that is breast cancer. Rather than simply referring to breast cancer as an enemy for all women to be aware of, this message uses multiple forms of violence to threaten and kill breast cancer. And society isn't killing breast cancer like characters are killed in horror films, because then it wouldn't actually be dead. This time, Komen and its followers are killing breast cancer for real.
This ad wants the audience to experience feelings of violence-until-death towards breast cancer, and by using words of violence as God-terms to address how we should feel towards breast cancer, the Devil-term, the ad itself seems to invite a more masculine approach and audience rather than the usual females pulled in by all-pink color schemes and soft layouts.
What's also interesting is that by suggesting violent human acts to defeat this disease, breast cancer seems to take on more of a human rather than medical role. After the first sentence, breast cancer is referred to as 'it'. It has now become something we can beat up, something we can kill and then make our mark on with a pink ribbon. This ad connects actions of violence with feelings of gentleness as it pulls in the ideas of harmful physical acts and the soft touch of what Roland Barthes would call a 'signifier' in the pink ribbon that is known to mean support for breast cancer patients and survivors.
This artifact isn't asking us to view breast cancer as only a disease, but as some sort of physical being. The ideology behind this ad is centered around the disease, but is pushing the audience to see breast cancer as something more than a medical diagnosis. Breast cancer is now something that we can do physical damage to, something that we can kill, and something that we can make our mark on to let others know who the champion is. Komen seems to think that breast cancer has become the opposing gladiator, and whoever kills the other first wins.
No comments:
Post a Comment