The red, blue, black, orange and white bras almost blended in, dangling among the turning fall leaves on the Syracuse University Quad.

Good thing there were nearly topless women to point them out.

In a 10-minute blitz, members of the SU advertising agency, The NewHouse, and their friends passed out stickers and flyers in varying degrees of nudity. Cleavage fully exposed, members of the group sought to raise awareness of the Feel Your Boobies Foundation and its YouBoob Funniest Video Contest. Just in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which starts tomorrow.

‘The Feel Your Boobies organization raises breast cancer awareness in nontraditional ways,’ said Kaitlin Bevans, a senior advertising major who helped expose the last-minute Quad campaign. ‘They want to target college students, but they don’t want to lecture them because they know students won’t listen to that.’

The YouBoob Funniest Video Contest encourages people to submit 60-second videos documenting how they would remind women to check themselves for breast cancer. The contest’s website urges contestants to be lighthearted, creative and edgy with their videos. The winner will receive $10,000.

‘The contest is so easy, and it’s for a really good cause that we felt we needed to build awareness for,’ said Danielle Colvin, a senior Spanish and advertising major who spearheaded the campaign.

The campaign took place between 2:05 p.m. and 2:15 p.m., when students are usually walking to and from class. Some members of The NewHouse recruited their friends to help out. Volunteers positioned themselves at the front of the Quad between the School of Information Studies and Huntington Beard Crouse Hall and at the College Place bus stop: areas where between-class traffic is typically high. Though turnout was slow at the beginning, students began pouring in by the campaign’s end.

The organizers chose to catch people’s attention by decorating trees on the Quad with bras and by having volunteers take off their shirts, Bevans said. The girls who didn’t feel comfortable taking off their shirts wore bras over their shirts, which also grabbed onlookers’ attention.

One passing woman stared in confusion at a student who was wearing a bra over her shirt and waving a sheet of stickers around.

‘Are you interested in breast cancer awareness?’ the student asked the woman.

‘Oh!’ the woman replied, as the confusion immediately left her face. ‘I thought this was just a new fashion trend I didn’t know about!’

Whether or not passing students accepted the stickers and flyers, they all took notice of the scene. Many curious viewers began laughing as they got closer.

‘Everyone was curious, but no one really said anything negative,’ said Marisa Schachner, a senior fashion design major. She said she took her shirt off because it supported the cause, and she knew it would be a good way to attract attention to it.

‘I stuck stickers on a lot of people,’ she said. Most of them laughed and continued walking, she said.

Although the scene may not have made an immediate impression on some, Bevans said the point was to make a lasting impact.

‘They may not look at the flyers and stuff now, but when they’re going through their book bags later, they’ll see it and remember the event on the Quad,’ she said.

Bevans said each component of the campaign, if done individually, would have felt bare. But by putting their bras in full view, passersby could easily connect faces to the bras on the trees, giving a strong, well-rounded impression.

Colvin said the campaign could have had far more cleavage, but many could not show due to scheduling issues.

‘A ton of people wanted to help but couldn’t because they had class,’ she said.

While the students planned the guerilla marketing campaign as a fun, creative way to grab the attention of the university community, the ultimate goal of the campaign was for people to look at the handouts and remind themselves or their friends to feel their boobies.

‘Obviously, seeing half-naked girls on the Quad is an attention-grabber,’ Colvin said, ‘but we really wanted to raise awareness for the foundation.’

ertocci@syr.edu

Published on September 29, 2010 at 12:00 pm