‘Pink Glove Dance’ Take 3: Winning Video Announced
In November 2009, Medline Industries Inc. released “Pink Glove Dance,” a video of 200 Portland, Ore., hospital workers donning the medical supply company’s new line of pink exam gloves and dancing to Jay Sean’s “Down.”
To date, the video, intended to promote breast cancer awareness and prevention, has received 13 million views on YouTube.
“We had no idea what to expect,” John Marks, Medline’s director of public relations, told ABC News today in a phone interview. “That one took off.”
Last year the company released a “Sequel” in October that showed 4,000 health care workers and breast cancer survivors from across North America shaking their groove thang to the Best Day Ever’s “You Won’t Dance Alone.”
So this year, Medline asked health care workers and average Joes from the U.S. and Canada to create their own group dance videos and submit them for an online contest.
The company received 139 submissions from 40 states and Canada.
“We were surprisingly overwhelmed by the responses,” Marks said. “We went from 200 people two years ago to tens of thousands of people now — all in the name of bringing hope and joy to those affected by breast cancer.”
Medline asked visitors to its website to vote for the Top 3 videos. And this evening, the company shared its three winners with ABC News. Lexington Medical Center in West Columbia, S.C., took first place.
Of the more than a half-million votes received, the hospital’s staff, volunteers and breast cancer survivors garnered more than 60,000. Their video entry is shown above.
Dancing for the Vera Bradley Foundation, Lexington’s group shook its groove thangs to Katy Perry’s “Fireworks” as it waved glow sticks and performed a choreographed routine. For its top place finish, the team’s charity will receive $10,000 in its name.
Second and third place went to Highland Hospital and Victoria Hospital-Prince Albert Parkland Health Region in Saskatchewan, Canada. Their chosen breast cancer charities will get $5,000 and $2,000, respectively.
Medline donates $1 to the National Breast Cancer Foundation for every purchased case of its Generation Pink gloves to fund free mammograms for women in need. Medline says it’s donated more than $800,000 to the foundation.