The women we interviewed, says that the presence of the Pink Ribbon is indifferent to them. It’s vague, and do not represent their struggle. Besides that, the great majority of the breast cancer campaign uses models that never had cancer. To break that taboo we designed a campaign especially to those women, from the logo to the models. We start redesigning the logo. We wanted them to feel like we were talking straight to them, and something they would feel proud to carry. So we designed a Pink Scar.

Besides that, we invited women who been thru the surgery to be the heroines of our campaign and a role model to the 57000 other women who goes thru mastectomy every year in Brazil.

On October 5th we launched the digital platform to present our new logo, the Pink Scar, our models and to raise discussion on the subject.

We got the partnership with Palmeiras, but how could we show that having their main symbol removed and replaced by a scar cannot take away someone’s identity?

Simple math, we asked Palmeiras to remove it’s main symbol from the chest, the badge, and replace by a Pink Scar. There were 30.000 people on the stadium that day and 10 million watched at home. There was massive coverage of the press. After that we invited brands to do the same. Replace their logos from, sunglasses, shirts, packages, social network.

We also encouraged people to support those women replacing their identity on networks (the profile picture) by our Pink scar.

Results

What started as an awareness campaign, reached much more than expected.

tier 1: Thousands of people replaced their profile picture on Facebook by the Pink Scar.

The response from the women was so good, that Femama decided to use the Pink Scar as the official symbol for the Pink October for the years to come.

tier 2: 100 million impressions on the internet.

tier 3: more than 40 brands joined in, converting part of the money raised from the sale of the merchandising in donations to Femama.

500% increase of money donation raised compared to the previous years.

They earned more than 10 million dollars on media.

Being submitted to mastectomy, having the breast removed and the head shaved doesn’t mean that the woman is cured from cancer.

As if the excruciating treatment wasn’t enough the woman has other matters to worry.

It’s known that the breast cancer is not the strongest of the cancer, but according to women we interviewed is the more devastating, in a psychological way.

And the feeling of having it’s femininity taken away is a great enemy on the recovering.

That’s why Femama, decided to develop a campaign to break the taboo, end the prejudice and mainly to stand by those women.

The NGO’s headquarter is in the south of the country, but it’s branches are spread in 18 of the 27 states. So we started with a traditional campaign in the country’s main city: São Paulo, in order to have the message echoed to the smaller towns.

There we started with a digital platform, press and OOH campaign. To keep spreading the message to the rest of the country we also worked with OOH on the main city of the north/northeast city of the country: Salvador.

But we needed to be louder than that, to reach the whole country. So we tapped into Brazilian’s biggest passion: football. We teamed up with Palmeiras Football Club, with one of the biggest female supporters of the country. 5 million women amongst it’s more than 16 millons fans.

After that we also invited brands to join the movement.

We also spread the hashtag biggerthanascar to endorse the cause.

Although breast cancer campaigns has been doing a great job during the past 20 years, an important part of the diseases has been barely mentioned: the mastectomy. 100% of women interviewed says they lost more than the breast, they have lost their identity. They feel ashamed of their scars. Besides that they don’t feel represented by any breast cancer campaign specially by it’s main symbol, the Pink Ribbon. Femama asked us to try a completely different approach to talk to the 57.000 women submitted to mastectomy every year in Brazil. Femama wanted to show them that their scars should not be a symbol of embarrassment, it should be a symbol of their strength, it should show that they been through several surgeries and they still alive, beautiful and feminine. We wanted to show them that no matter what happen, nothing could be bigger than their will to live.