How Stand Up To Cancer Won Over Big Celebs, Important Brands and the Medical Community

In 2008, an hour-long telethon dedicated to raising funds for cancer research hosted by Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C), then a relatively new nonprofit organization, attracted a host of boldface names: Christina Applegate, Lance Armstrong, Sheryl Crow, Melissa Etheridge and Patrick Swayze, all of whom had been diagnosed with cancer, as well as musicians like Beyoncé, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Miley Cyrus, Fergie and Carrie Underwood, who together performed a song written especially for the occasion called “Just Stand Up.” Even then-presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama made an appearance via taped messages discussing how they’d tackle the issue of cancer in the Oval Office.

Stand Up To Cancer got all three major broadcast networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—to agree to air the special simultaneously, a rare occurrence in TV.

The event ultimately raised $100 million and became a biannual tradition. Stand Up To Cancer’s televised events, held every other September, still draw the same level of celebrity involvement. Last year’s telethon, SU2C’s sixth, was attended by nearly 60 celebrities. In a little over a decade, the organization has raised a total of more than $600 million for cancer research, and perhaps most impressive, has facilitated over 100 clinical trials and helped six drug therapies win FDA approval.

Will & Grace star Eric McCormack works the phones at the sixth biennial Stand Up to Cancer telethon in 2018.

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Nine women co-founded Stand Up To Cancer, including Rusty Robertson and Sue Schwartz, who are accepting Adweek’s 2019 Brand Save Award. A veteran of both the marketing industry and the nonprofit world, Robertson leads marketing agencies RPR & Associates and with Schwartz, the Robertson Schwartz Agency (RSA), and was part of the team that launched the Susan G. Komen foundation. Schwartz is a former evp of Revlon, Almay cosmetics and the Home Shopping Network. RSA heads up the marketing, branding and promotional initiatives for SU2C.

Both Robertson and Schwartz lost their mothers to cancer: Robertson’s mother died just weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2001, and Schwartz’s mother died of multiple myeloma—her sisters are cancer survivors as well.

Angry and confused about how long her mother’s cancer had gone undetected—the tumor had been growing for nearly two years before the diagnosis—Robertson started asking questions. What she discovered was that although there was endless cancer research underway, its progress was slowed because doctors and researchers weren’t effectively collaborating.

“Scientists were not sharing anything from one floor to another,” says Robertson. “They weren’t sharing any of their findings. … It was all because of intellectual property and publishing.”

Schwartz felt similarly—that the timeline of cancer research didn’t move quickly enough. “This cause is very personal to me,” she said. “When I was supporting [my family] in their journeys, it became increasingly evident to me that more needed to be done to accelerate the pace of cancer research and get new therapies to patients quickly.”

So Robertson, Schwartz and their co-founders—all of whom had personal experience with cancer, and in many cases, with cancer charities—established Stand Up To Cancer.

The organization creates 'Dream Teams' comprising up to 50 doctors, scientists, researchers and other experts. Here, representatives from SU2C, the National Cancer Institute, the Lustgarten Foundation and the American Association for Cancer Research announce the SU2C-Lustgarten Pancreatic Cancer Interception Dream Team and Translational Research Team in 2017.

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Their focus on collaborative cancer research is a distinguishing factor of their charity. It also creates “Dream Teams,” comprising up to 50 doctors, scientists, researchers and other experts, to home in on various aspects of “cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment.” And because the organization isn’t specialized in one type of cancer, it can fund ambitious projects.

SU2C is also focused on providing opportunities for those who may not have them otherwise, thus opening more pathways to potential breakthroughs. They’ve given out 46 grants (each totaling $750,000) to young scientists to support high-risk, high-reward cancer research.

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