In a current thread ("We need you,") ardeee makes the point, which has been made before, that advertising to bring attention to the efforts to battle PCa substantially lags behind what the BC people have been able to do.
He's right in saying that this is not a competition, but he's also right to point out that we could do better, especially in getting the word out about
PCa and what is being done to combat it.
Or could we? The link below is to an interesting article in which the author maintains that research is starting to show that
too many breast cancer ads in so many different media are actually
"turning women off" to both learning about
and making contributions to the cause. A researcher cites the reason for this as:
"When people are faced with a personal threat, they tend to subconsciously go on the defensive. In this case, when women are exposed to information about breast cancer at the same time that they are reminded that they are vulnerable to it, they subconsciously try to push away the idea both that they’re vulnerable and that breast cancer is something they, or anyone, needs to worry about."The result is that people will start "attention shut down" from prolonged exposure to all the advertising, and the ads will eventually become less and less effective.
In short, the author believes that all of the "pink" advertising for years now has started to overwhelm people, who just want to go think about
something else.
Why is this important to us here in the PCa camp? Because, if the PCa powers-that-be (whoever they are) ever actually do get the chance to do substantially more advertising outreach to the public, as the BC people have already been doing for many years, they will want to avoid any mistakes that other cancer public awareness campaigns, such as BC, have made.
That is, assuming of course that the advertising missteps by the BC people, as claimed in the article, are in fact true.
But even if there is controversy in these claims, it is still useful to stop and think about
them.
So maybe the answer is that
quality advertising is, after all, better than
quantity?msmagazine.com/blog/2011/10/21/the-problem-with-pink/