by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 6, 2006 | Behavior Change, Blog, Entertainment, Storytelling
In an editorial on Sunday in the LA Times, Maria DiBattista asks whether movies can change people’s minds about social issues, using “Brokeback Mountain” as an example:
Movies can envision the need for social change, but it is unclear that they can help bring it about. They are better at pointing the way to a different, happier, more fulfilling life. Not the least interesting thing about the hopeless love dramatized in “Brokeback Mountain,” which garnered eight Oscar nominations last week, is how many social hopes it has inspired. Ang Lee, after winning the award as best director at the Golden Globes, hailed “the power of movies to change the way we’re thinking,” although he later thought it advisable to wait to “see how it plays out.”
…Movies can take on the great social problems of their time, but they may be the least effective — or appropriate — medium for solving them. Did “Gentleman’s Agreement” mark the beginning of the end of anti-Semitism in America? Did “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” make it easier for interracial couples to marry? Did “Wall Street” help unseat the captains of industry and discredit their doctrine of “greed is good”? Name any “problem film” — whether it deals with discrimination (racial, ethnic, sexual or religious), social reform (of schools, prisons, legislatures) or corporate corruption (national or global) — and you will come up with the same unimpressive results. The more designs a movie has on us, the less willing we are to change our minds, much less our social and business practices.
I have to disagree with her premise. I think that movies — whether feature films or TV movies — have the potential to change attitudes and beliefs, and ultimately to bring about individual and social change. In many cases, a movie may be the first exposure an individual has to a particular topic, raising the awareness that a problem exists. Think “Erin Brockovich” (environmental hazards), “Hotel Rwanda” (genocide), “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (mental institutions) or the recent “Human Trafficking” on Lifetime, which I’ve discussed over on Craig Lefebvre’s blog.
When health issues are portrayed and humanized in a movie, viewers are left with a richer understanding of what it must be like for a person with that condition and the people who take care of them. Movies like “A Beautiful Mind” (schizophrenia), “My Left Foot” (cerebral palsy), “Philadelphia” (AIDS), “Children of a Lesser God” (deafness), “Rain Man” (autism) and “Lorenzo’s Oil” (adrenoleukodystrophy – ALD) are all examples of stories with sympathetic characters that bring us into their world. Awareness is the first step to understanding, which may then lead to a desire to do something and make a difference — or at least be more sensitive to people with these conditions.
Organizations addressing the crisis in Darfur actively promoted the viewing of the film “Hotel Rwanda” precisely to get people involved in confronting the current genocide. The miniseries “Human Trafficking” is part of Lifetime’s strategy to raise awareness of this issue with their audience and get them to take action. Movies can be the catalyst for individual and social change.
Micki Krimmel makes the point on the WorldChanging blog that
To a surprisingly great degree, the real power of films to affect social change is determined by the marketing…
Hollywood marketers should take a cue from social action groups, and not just by copying their grassroots marketing model. There are clearly large groups of people out there who care about social causes and are just waiting for a movie they can get behind. If people believe in something, they’ll market it for you.
The irony is that when the Hollywood marketers get hold of a film with the potential to spark social change, they minimize the controversial or issue-based aspects of the movie to make it more palatable to a broad audience. This then waters down the appeal of the film to the people who would be most likely to take the issue and run with it if they had been mobilized as part of the marketing strategy.
Movies can be powerful. They let us live someone else’s life for 2 hours. They can help us understand the world from another’s viewpoint. They can show us things we would never see in our own lifetimes. When a movie comes out that addresses the issues you care about, use the opportunity to galvanize others and harness the power of film to change hearts and minds.
UPDATE:
I just came across this website – Participate.net – that is associated with Participant Productions, where Micki Krimmel (linked above) works. Participant Productions is a film company started by Jeff Skoll of eBay, which produces movies specifically intended to bring about social change. Their recent films include Syriana, North Country, and Good Night and Good Luck. Participate.net explicitly seeks to link the social action component described above with each movie. Whether or not you fall on the same side as them politically, this is a very interesting model with great potential for social marketing.
by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 6, 2006 | Blog, Marketing
I have no interest in the Super Bowl. I guess that’s awfully un-American. Yet, yesterday I found myself at a family Super Bowl party, lured by the prospect of guacamole, chili and cornbread. So, while I must admit I did actually watch some of the game (who was playing again?), I paid much more attention to the commercials. Some were clever, some were annoying and some just made me say, “huh?” It’s not a good sign when you can’t remember what product the commerical was promoting as soon as it’s over.
While I saw plenty of ads for beer, cars, soda, beer, fast food, dot coms, beer and beer, I was disappointed that there was not much social marketing to be found. The NFL ran some PSAs of its own, promoting its players’ efforts to help after Katrina, and encouraging people to get involved with the United Way.
Dove, partnering with the Girl Scouts, launched its Campaign for Real Beauty to boost girls’ self-esteem about their appearance.
In Minnesota, the Minnesota Partnership for Action Against Tobacco ran ads to raise awareness of the effects of secondhand smoke. I don’t know if other organizations ran Super Bowl ads locally.
To see all of the ads that ran nationally, go to iFilm.
I realize that most organizations doing social marketing cannot afford to purchase an ad on the Super Bowl. A 30-second spot cost $2.5 million and reached between 90 million and 130 million people — many of whom were actually paying attention to the commercials. For a social marketing campaign targeting issues like men’s health, alcohol abuse prevention or obesity, this would have been a sterling opportunity to make an impact as well as generating buzz.
by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 2, 2006 | Blog, Social Marketing
This campaign is just plain creepy. The Washington State Health Department’s Tobacco Prevention and Control Program is running a series of TV ads viewable on the AshtrayMouth website that are basically Fear Factor meets Chucky meets the Truth campaign. Though the premise is that kissing a smoker is as gross as kissing an ashtray, they take it way beyond that.
In the ads, with a spooky music box playing in the background, the expressionless, mute doll children stuff disgusting things like dead rats and cat hairballs into their mouths while putting the moves on their girl/boyfriends, who then leave without comment.
On the website, if you have the stomach for it, you can also play a game that involves selecting various disgusting items like worms, rotten tomatoes, dirty socks and cockroaches, then putting them into the mouth of the creepy doll head of your choice. The items splatter all over the dolls’ faces as they eat and we then see a comment that says something like, “Yum, smoker breath!”
Now, I know that I’m not part of the target audience for this ad. And my first reaction was to be viscerally repulsed and want to get away from the website as quickly as possible. So if this campaign was developed using a social marketing approach and found to be effective with the youth it is targeted toward — who have grown up watching people eat bugs on Fear Factor — then more power to them for taking this unorthodox angle. I can’t stand this campaign, but it may be an illustration of the principle I often espouse that it doesn’t matter what you think of a campaign if you are not a member of the target audience. What matters is how they respond to it.
Let’s hope, for the sake of all the Washingtonian grown-ups who may come across this campaign, that the kids are responding.
by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 1, 2006 | Blog, Social Marketing
The Wall Street Journal this weekend ran a story entitled “Beating the Odds: How a gamble on defibrillators turned Las Vegas into the safest place to have your heart give out” (no link – they require an online subscription for access). People at casinos are generally at a higher risk of cardiac arrest because of their age, heavy smoking and drinking while gambling, huge buffets, and sleepless nights at the slots (not to mention the stress of losing lots of money).
The story described how a Las Vegas-based paramedic named Richard Hardman found that 50% of the cardiac arrest episodes his department handled took place at casinos — usually with a casino security officer standing right next to the victim. He launched a campaign to get the casinos to train their security officers in how to use a defibrillator, and had a hard time at first getting past the objections of the lawyers. But he and his partners in this project perservered and succeeded by using several effective methods:
- They partnered with a researcher interested in studying the use of defibrillators by lay people to establish data showing the effectiveness of the program. They did a pilot study with seven casinos to start collecting data.
- They prepared the security guards for success in every possible scenario by acting the role of a collapsed patron in various real-life situations.
- They leveraged their first success story — a man who happened to come into one of the seven pilot study casinos just before going into arrest and was revived with a defibrillator by security officers. When the other casinos saw the publicity that one received, they wanted their staff trained as well.
- They found ways of removing the barriers to adoption of this program — by making sure that casino executives understood that the defibrillator would only work on somebody who was clinically dead with no pulse or breathing function; by lobbying to have the state’s “Good Samaritan” law extended to include users of defibrillators; and by arranging a donation to casinos of about 30 defibrillators.
The study showed that the program was a big success — 53% of people who suffer sudden cardiac arrest at casinos survive — compared with the national average survival of well under 10%. When a defibrillator was used within 3 minutes of the collapse — not impossible given the close monitoring that casinos conduct of their patrons — the survival rate increases to 74%. Now every large casino operator owns dozens of defibrillators and trains their employees to use them. In the past nine years, Las Vegas security officers have restored the heartbeats of about 1,800 gamblers and employees in their casinos.
This is an impressive case study of how to get a new product adopted and in widespread use — and by someone who probably did not even realize what he was doing was social marketing.
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 31, 2006 | Blog, Marketing
Here are some reasons from Rohit Bhargava on why advocacy can be more effective online:
- Overcomes boundaries of distance & national borders
- Makes it easier for “observers” to participate.
- Gives you a destination to place all supporting content and messages to change minds.
- Reduces the necessity for celebrities, politicians and governments to raise issue profile.
- Provides less-intrusive way for people to pass on the message through email.
- Supports word of mouth activity and provides more venues for messages to travel virally.
- Allows individuals to support sensitive/political causes anonymously.
- Encourages “impulse” donations and makes it easier for organizations to manage donations.
I have to agree with all of these reasons. However, it’s easy to forget that relying exclusively on online methods excludes large numbers of potential advocates for your cause. Here are some statistics to keep in mind from a study released in October from the Pew Internet & American Life Center:
Sixty-eight percent of American adults, or about 137 million people, use the internet, up from 63% one year ago. Thirty-two percent of American adults, or about 65 million people, do not go online, and it is not always by choice. Certain groups continue to lag in their internet adoption. For example:
- 26% of Americans age 65 and older go online, compared with 67% of those age 50-64, 80% of those age 30-49, and 84% of those age 18-29.
- 57% of African-Americans go online, compared with 70% of whites.
- 29% of those who have not graduated from high school have access, compared with 61% of high school graduates and 89% of college graduates.
- 60% of American adults who do not have a child living at home go online, compared with 83% of parents of minor children.
Using online advocacy methods only would make it impossible for most seniors and many minority or lower income populations to become involved with your campaign. For an issue that might impact these types of groups disproportionately, that would be a large potential deficit in your reach and effectiveness. Social marketers need to make sure that we don’t forget the basics of community organization when newer and flashier methods tempt us to just go with what’s easiest to implement.
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 30, 2006 | Blog, Social Media
A new site has popped up called 8by1: Wishlist for Your World that is a Web 2.0 take on promoting social change (the name translates as “vertical infinity by anyone”). On this site, you can post your “wish for the world” that will make the world a better place. Besides just wishing, you can also provide action steps that people can take toward your goal, links for more information, and your own comments about the issue. Wishes that have been posted range from the predictable “world peace” to “more people with hybrid cars,” “affordable health care,” “keeping baseball in the Olympics” and “more nightspots in Vancouver.”
You can invite others to share your wish and even find others in your city that you can work with to make the wishes come true (okay, maybe not the people who wished for “Britney Spears to Dump K Fed”). The site is too new to know whether it will be an actual jumping-off point for any real change, but the idea has potential.
Another similar site, but geared toward the personal level, is 43 Things. On this site, people post the things they want most for themselves — things like “lose weight,” “get married,” “get organized,” “learn to tap dance” and “see the Northern Lights.” It’s a good place to see what kinds of things people value in their lives. For each goal that someone posts, they can provide updates on their progress and others can share their own success stories on how they made that change. For example, 639 people have said that they want to “give blood.” 98% of people who left comments said that it is “worth doing.” People talk about their own experiences, ask for advice about the donation process and receive answers from their peers. What a great place for an organization promoting blood donation to either advertise or become part of the conversation (with full disclosure of who they are, of course).
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
