Viral gone wild: Girls flash their Facebook friends for breast cancer awareness

Hooray for boobies!

It was girls gone virtually wild on Facebook yesterday, as a ‘tell us your bra colour’ meme quickly infected the rest of the world from some patient zeros in Detroit. I heard about it on a New York ladies’ forum before I saw it in action, with the rationale that it was for breast cancer awareness. When it popped up amongst my Facebook friends, the ‘awareness’ mechanism became clear: each highly descriptive, cryptic colour was like a wink, forcing you to pause a moment and picture each friend in her skivvies.

So how does that steamy little moment promote breast cancer awareness? Jaded females wondered if they were being pwned by the internet and giving up the goods for free. But think about it: there are a couple approaches to marketing a cause*. Show people the disaster that looms without their support, or make them think about the great thing they already have & threaten to take it away. In the case of boobs, you’ve got a great product to call to mind! Taking a moment (or several, depending on the size of friends list) to reflect on the glory of boobs certainly makes you appreciate them. You’d hate to see any lost to breast cancer.

Had this “campaign” been executed by marketers who knew the second part of the equation—turning that interest into “conversion”, that is, making people do something with their newfound awareness—some dollars could have been raised towards a cure. It’s unlikely that after a long day of mentally appreciating his female friend’s chests, a dude would make the connection, look up a breast cancer charity and donate.

Which brings us to “dudes” in general. The part of the meme that really works in terms of awareness is the sexual moment, so does the idea work a little better on the gentlemen than the ladies? Nope, there’s something in it for everybody! The idea went so viral because of the flip side of that sexual moment, the harmless tease that the girls got to give in the name of a cause. They too had to consider their boobies, and what it would be like to not have that sexual capital, should they be lost to breast cancer. The message has the potential, wrapped in this flirty game, to have big significance to both sexes.

Great viral, but because it wasn’t thoroughly planned, there was an odd component that prevented the conversion follow-through: it was apparently supposed to be secret. Mashable posted a story on the meme and got roasted in their Facebook comments for exposing the mystery. It’s arguable, however, that the connection to being virtually flashed by your female friends and the danger of losing the contents of their bras to breast cancer is not as strong if you’re not in on the joke until some time later. Acting fast on the genuine raw emotion is what gets donations.

You’re in on it now, so if you had a good time flashing or being flashed yesterday, or just appreciate a nice Victoria’s Secret moment now and then, why not drop a dollar in the search for a cure?

*There are more approaches, of course: direct marketing guru Herschell Gordon Lewis wrote that you had to appeal to either fear, exclusivity, guilt, greed or ego gratification in order to sell something. Visually, though, with cause marketing, you either gotta present the happy face (fear) or the sad face (guilt).