Days are sometimes tagged for marketing purposes. You know what I mean: Walk to School Day, World Kidney Day, Red Balloon Day, White Ribbon Day, etc.
Sometimes the day takes off and becomes an extravaganza like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. Sometimes they get big for a few years and then fade away, like Red Nose Day, although it’s making a comeback.
Make no mistake, these are marketing promotions. Often they have good intent to raise awareness about a health condition or to collect funds for a charity, but they are still marketing events and they are proliferating.
I’ve just about had enough. Some of them I find quite irritating.
Take Red Nose Day, for example. I recall working at Ceduna in the early 90s when this day was original and interesting. Normally sane people used to pay money to wear clown noses. I could live with that because the Rudolph gear usually came off at the end of the day.
What annoyed me was the people who plastered red noses over the front of their motor vehicles. In most cases they remained there for months afterwards. I used to cringe and curse every time I saw one on the highway. My affection for the campaign to stop SIDS was tested.
I feel the same today about head shaving promotions. They have become so common as to diminish the value of the currency.
When people started shaving their heads to raise money for the Leukaemia Foundation it was a novelty. It was news to see regular citizens remove their curly mops for a good cause. Today it is so passe.
The marketers will disagree with me because more people are participating and they are making more money. But my patience as a newspaper editor has worn thin. I have decreed the news value of such events to be almost non-existent and we will no longer photograph them.
It’s like the old story of dog bites man. Boring. Man bites dog is a story.
I was talking with a hairdresser about this and she persuaded me that my frustration with head shave promotions was justified. She is being approached by more and more people for free shaves at the end of the fund raising.
What irks her is that when the idea started people had to raise a certain amount of money to qualify. Today it is pretty much open slather.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that people don’t have to go the full monty shave. In the case of women participants they can just have a short hair cut or change the color of their hair.
And given there is more than one head shave day (Bluey Day is another example) I fail to see the news value.
Many of these days are organised by charities or not-for-profit organisations. I commend them for thinking outside the square, but challenge them to know when there has been too much of a good thing. Run your special day for a few years, learn when it has peaked and give it a rest.
The trouble is the groups come to rely on the money raised. If they become dependent on this money they risk a catastrophe when the general public decides enough is enough.
