Heads Up: Why so serious?
I can only apologise in advance for this one as I have had this song stuck in my head all week since writing this edition… watch with caution.
When conducting the creative idea generation training that I run with organisations in this space, I encourage campaigners to consider being playful and using humour as a way to attract attention and get their message across. The most common concern to this approach is that we should be tackling this serious issue with a serious and professional response and anything playful would undermine the core message.
I disagree with this statement in almost every case and this campaign example might help me out here…
The Brief: In 2012, Metro Trains Melbourne in Australia were responsible for creating a public service announcement campaign to promote railway safety.
The Campaign:
Metro Trains took a serious topic, the most serious of all, death, and created a smart and captivating campaign. The concept centres around fun characters dying in common but comical ways resulting in the world's most shared public service announcement.
The top execs knew that their message was boring; ‘please try to be more safe’ and so they had to think really hard about how to engage their audience and get them to take their message seriously.
They are quoted as saying; "The aim of this campaign is to engage an audience that really doesn't want to hear any kind of safety message, and we think dumb ways to die will." Metro Trains Melbourne
The Stats:
Within 24 hours, the Dumb Ways to Die song reached the top 10 chart on iTunes.
The video has over 150 million views and 4.8 million shares. And today, Dumb Ways to Die is still among the most shared ads of all time. Supported by an integrated advertising campaign and hugely successful game app, it spawned a plethora of global parodies and spin-offs, attracting massive global media attention for Metro Trains and its safety message.
Dumb Ways to Die remains the most awarded campaign in the history of Cannes. More importantly, 127 million people have stated that they would be more safe around trains because of the campaign and there was a 21% reduction in "near-miss" accidents involving trains.
Why does it stand out?
➡ ️ They use a catchy but simple theme song
➡ ️It’s bright and colourful
➡ It’s less focussed on a particular brand and more on the core message
➡ It’s centred around an excellent concept
It's easy to get attention by being odd and surprising, but this works on different levels making it a much more intelligent campaign. Using the term 'dumb' assigns a character trait to risky behaviour which is a more powerful tool when trying to adjust behaviour than just saying that the issue is dangerous/bad. People generally wouldn’t describe themselves as ‘dumb’ so they try to disassociate with this trait and therefore the actions of someone with that trait. It's 'Extremeness Aversion' or 'Congruence Bias' where people are told; X is dumb, I'm not dumb, I won't do it.
The opposite of this framing could actually cause more harm because perhaps just saying 'that's dangerous' could actually entice risk-takers rather than deter.
And it goes further, the creative itself is 'dumb', it's silly, and that is multiplicative with the concept.
Heads Up Challenge: Think less serious
(Copy the below into a working document that you can use for the challenge each week)
Identify a brief for your own work.
Write down three ways in which you could turn a serious campaign of yours into a more playful message
The 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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