Last Word – Shocking, But Did the Message Get Through?

Sometime you have to shock people to get them to sit up and take notice – a la smoking ads and gruesome road safety scenes. But for the first time when climate change is presented in this fashion, going further than Al Gore’s pedestrian powerpoint approach, people are not only shocked they get the ads taken off the air in the UK. Here’s what Sara Philips wrote about it in her environment section of ABC:

Violent ending to climate change ads

BY SARA PHILLIPS

ABC Environment | 1 OCT 2010

The 10:10 campaign shows a bloody end for students who do not want to reduce their carbon emissions.

Timed to capture the zeitgeist generated by the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen last year, the British government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change released a TV advertisement outlining the dangers of climate change, and encouraging people to take action.

It showed a little girl being read a bedtime story in which the nasty CO2 monster seemed set to take over the world. “Is there a happy ending?” she asked her dad, at which point the public service announcement kicked in with: “it’s up to us”.

The advertisement attracted hundreds of complaints. It was viewed by those that opposed the ad as being “upsetting and scaremongering”.

Heaven only knows what the people making those complaints would make of the latest ad doing the rounds on the Internet.

10:10 originally started as a British campaign but has spread beyond that corner of the world. It is supported by green groups 350 and Do Something in Australia. The latest offering from this organisation is titled “No pressure”. It shows a school teacher encouraging her class to get behind the campaign to reduce their own emissions by 10 per cent. “No pressure,” she says, before noting which kids are not planning to participate. She then presses a little red button on a black box and blows the non-conforming children to smithereens. Nearby children are splattered with gore.

The same theme is then repeated in an office, with a soccer team and with Gillian Anderson in a radio studio.

This ad is clearly supposed to be funny and shocking. Franny Armstrong, 10:10 founder told The Guardian, “Clearly we don’t really think they should be blown up, that’s just a joke for the mini-movie”.

But the reaction has not been universally positive. On Twitter, Tim Hollo (who is media advisor to Christine Milne, but was expressing his own views) tweeted, “I cannot possibly imagine this vid convincing one single person to take part in 10:10 #badcomms #climate #fail”.

Meanwhile, Graham Readfearn, freelance journalist and occasional writer for ABC Environment found it “so funny, I had to watch it twice.”

For better or worse, violence seems to be a recurring theme of climate awareness campaigns.

Earlier this year another British green group, Plane Stupid tried to make people aware of the climate impact of flying. They released an ad in which distant objects appeared to be falling from the sky. On closer inspection they are revealed to be polar bears plummeting towards to Earth, where they land with a bloody thump.

Another ad from the US Environmental Defence Fund showed climate change as a racing locomotive. A man on the tracks manages to step aside in time, but a child is left, demonstrating to us that climate change will have the most impact on our children.

Earlier this year, Greenpeace campaigned to have Nestle stop using palm oil in its products. The Internet ad showed a man enjoying a break from work and a Kit Kat, which was in fact an orang-utan’s finger that spattered his keyboard with blood.

Violence in ads can work: the Greenpeace orang-utan campaign was successful.

Australia’s famously graphic transport accident ads have been exported to the world. According to a 2003 study from the Monash University Accident Research Centre, “An international review of road safety media campaigns found average crash reductions of between 8 per cent and 14 per cent”. Support with vigorous policing also contributed.

The UN also employed violence to emphasise the damage that landmines do everyday around the world.

But there is a difference between car crashes and landmines and climate change. With the first two, a gruesome outcome is possible: the ads warn of conceivable risks.

Climate change is not likely to end in a bloody puddle, however. Although wars over diminishing resources have been predicted by some, the worst-case scenarios usually centre around starvation, drowning and natural disasters.

So far, the ad has gone viral. All over Twitter and the Internet, people are sharing the video. By this standard, the violence used in the 10:10 ad has been successful.

When asked about whether they were concerned about offending people, Armstrong told The Guardian, “Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that’s not worth jumping up and down about, I don’t know what is.”

But as the panel from the Gruen Transfer repeatedly remind us, it’s not whether people see the ad, it’s whether people do anything after seeing it. The success of this ad will be determined by its ability to make people feel good about 10:10 and encourage more people to sign up to the campaign.

Judging by most of the comments on Youtube so far, it would not seem it has succeeded.

Source: www.abc.net.au

Believe it or not, I’m in Singapore again, in advance of a complete business move in November. I’ve mentioned before the setting up of Sustain Ability Showcase Asia, which is now operational with our first clients on board. This time, I’m in the heart of South East Asia to attend to business, meet old and new friends. But we will return to Australia – Melbourne to be exact – for next week’s Carbon Expo and still have some more time in Brisbane to be part of a flurry of October climate friendly events. No need to worry about ABC Carbon – book, newsletter and consulting – as it will continue and we will make sure we look after our loyal Australian supporters as well as the growing number from other parts of the world.