Heads Up: Emotional or rational arguments? Emotional, always.
Get ready to grimace and wince at this week's ad...
Providing rational arguments when trying to convince someone of something seems logical.
As Sharon Núñez notes in an interview about her naive early days as an animal advocate ‘if only people knew the facts about animal suffering, they’d be convinced instantly’.
Hand Sanitising Gel
The Brief:
Sanzer Hand Gel wanted to create an ad in Thailand for their gel. There are fairly obvious rational arguments about germs, cleanliness, convenience, health… and you’d be forgiven for making an ad that looked like this.
It has lots of useful codes; the + sign symbolising health, the colour green symbolising well-being and nature, it mentions key product benefits such as antibacterial qualities and makes a concrete statement of killing 99% of germs. But this isn’t the ad that they used.
The Campaign:
Sanzer Hand Gel, created by the agency Chuo Senko Thailand is as powerful as it is stomach-churning. The set of ads, that had a variety of iterations all held the simple tagline ‘What you really touch’. I’m fairly certain you’ll agree that this is far more impactful than the above ad, and yet it doesn’t mention product benefits, or have positive connotations of health, or even show the product itself.
These are powerful ads because they tap into the emotional, rather than explain the rational. In advertising, it’s called ‘need activation’ and there is good evidence to suggest that advertising that is emotional, rather than rational is more impactful.
Source: Les Binet and Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA
As self proclaimed ad-man Paul Feldwick says in this book, The Anatomy of Humbug: "Advertising works less by delivering rational messages and more by creating emotional connections, symbols, and associations that resonate with the unconscious mind."
Why does it stand out?
➡ ️ Speaks to a core emotional instinct over rational arguments
➡ ️You understand it without words, it explains itself
➡ ️The tagline doubles-down on the sentiment (say one thing and keep saying)
➡ ️The imagery is shocking and unique, not something you’ve seen before
➡ ️It taps into a core value that most people can relate to
In relation to our work, we need to produce campaign imagery and work that appeals to our targets’ key values (and not our own). Most people are disgusted by dirty things and maybe if we wanted them to be disgusted by farmed animals we could use a photo of a dirty pig in a farrowing crate. But we don’t want them to feel disgust, we want them to feel empathetic towards her which is a value some people have and some people don’t.
We need to be asking what our core target cares about and how can we activate this? Not a moralistic value that some do and don’t have which is harder to activate. Think; feeling clean, feeling safe, feeling loved, which are core values that many more people can relate to.
Heads Up Challenge: Think about what your target audience cares about
(Copy the below into a working document that you can use for the challenge each week)
What imagery could we use that would activate this?
Your Brief:
Idea 1:
Idea 2:
Idea 3:
Set aside a weekly 15 minute slot to complete these weekly creative tasks and why not schedule a call with others on your team to talk through your thoughts on this topic and share ideas for you to try out?
Heads Up is a weekly creative digest that encourages animal advocates to take inspiration from case studies of creative campaign tactics outside of our movement.
> ~ 5 minutes read-time (but hopefully gets you thinking for longer than that)
> Demonstrates interesting tactics and use of biases that you can test
> Contains a creative challenge for you to explore independently or with your team with results that you can apply for your important campaigning work
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