Black and White and Pink All Over

I admit it! I love women's magazines, and love to look at the latest fashions and read tips on how to live my my best life. So I pick up the latest O Magazine around Sept 20th, with Oprah in her hot pink outfit on the cover and I leaf through this issue fairly rapidly. Guess there wasn't that much that caught my interest. But after I finished, I had a strange image of the entire magazine as one big pink blur from cover to cover. Going back through the magazine my impression was verified with the images of pink clothing and lipstick interspersed with pages and pages of  pink ads promoting breast cancer awareness and research. So okay, October is coming up, which is National Breast Cancer Month and this was the October issue of  "O", but the odd thing was that for all the pink advertising there was not a single mention of  the specially dedicated month in any of the editorial pages.

Here are the companies and their ads in support of helping prevent and cure breast cancer.

Hanes Company and their support for the Susan B Komen's Pink For The Cure
Warrior in Pink, by Ford Motor company
Breast Cancer Research Foundation sponsored by Kmart
 "Shop Till You Stop Breast Cancer" page about products that contribute a portion of sales to support research, detection and treatment.
Ralph Lauren, Pink Pony
Vera Bradley with a note about their 10 million dollar contribution to breast cancer research

And to  "O" Magazine's credit, they ran a story about the latest advances on breast cancer research with a cover page of hundreds of female figurines standing  in a pink colored shape of a ribbon.
 
That's quite a lot of pink advertising-maybe not enough to provide the necessary resources to knock out a real killer of a disease. But as a consumer the effect of all this pink advertising interspersed with a lot of pink color on the fashion  pages, destroyed any impact that any one ad could have had on me. After my first skim through the magazine, not one company nor one non-profit stood out in my memory.

I applaud these companies like Ralph Lauren and others, doing whatever they can to help fight breast cancer, and I believe that "O" Magazine's intentions were to help promote this cause by having a such a pink colored issue. I would have preferred a little more thought to what the effects of creating this pink blur might have and a little more information about how to help beat breast cancer.

For more information on how you or your business can help support this cause in October, check out the site for the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.