Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

In response to the Robin Hood Tax ad, which is one of the best campaigning ads I have seen for a while, I thought I would post some historically very effective political and advocacy ads. I’m also currently reading The Political Brain, by Drew Westen that looks at the role of emotions in political campaigning. It has been an eye-opening read, so this also gave me some inspiration for this post.

This list is by no means definitive and if anyone wants to send links to some campaigning ads, that would be great, I’d love to watch them.

This post will focus on a few advocacy ads, starting with the Robin Hood Tax ad that has been the focus of the media of late. It is a very simple ad, two voices, one face but plenty of emotion. Bill Nighy plays a leading banker who ends up squirming in response to the questioning about why a Tobin Tax shouldn’t be created. Squirming bankers is something that reverberates with a good portion of the public at the moment. This campaign plays to the slightly divergent emotions of good will and revenge brilliantly.

This next ad scares the heck out of me, although I’m not sure how effective it is. Shock ads, as I have written before, have the tendency to decline in effectiveness over time simply because of people being desensitized. I’m not sure anyone would be able to put themselves in this guys shoes, unless they have been in the same situation.

This shock ad from PlaneStupid, the organisation that focuses on climate change issues caused by the global aviation industry, is different from the previous one however. Shocking - yes. Disturbing - definitely. Effective - most certainly. Polar bears dropping from the sky crushing cars and smashing into buildings may seem like an odd choice, but it is actually very clever. The stance is that every person on a trans-Atlantic flight creates 400kg of carbon. Most people can’t conceptualize what that means however. A polar bear, which is also an icon of climate change devastation, is imaginable. Therefore this appeals to our sense of wanting to save these animals, horror at their gruesome deaths but it also puts our carbon footprint into a physical and understandable context. It was filmed in Canada, but it could be any city, again personalising the imagery.

The final ad is one that has screened on UK screens recently and was the subject of a number of complaints, but is far more subtle that the polar bear ad. Act on CO2 is a non-departmental government body that is the public face of the Government’s climate change policy. This ad simply shows a father telling a bed-time story to his child, but it is a story of the effects of climate change and includes drowning pets and other disturbing results of unabated climate change. But this ad is clever in the fact that it appeals on a personal level to adults and children. This ad scares children, hence the complaints, but it also contextualizes climate change for them ensuring they understand the potential of doing nothing. It also will frighten adults on a parental level - how can I let my child live in a world like this, what can I do to prevent it?

As I said, this isn’t a complete list, but it just a tester. I’d love your thoughts and if you want to send me other campaigns, feel free. I’ll post the political ad blog in the next couple of days.

Cross posted with my personal blog

As a Public Affairs Consultant it has struck me as very odd that the Copenhagen Conference - set to begin in under a month - has no confirmed attendees. The UN announced over the weekend that they had assurances from 40 heads of state, but formally no-one is set to attend, which is merely fuelling speculation that the event will be a flop. When organising events for clients it is essential to get the messaging right before the event: it is key to have a good bill of attendees lined up and to put time into strategic promotion of the event. If an event is organised with assurances rather than confirmed attendance and there is a raft of negative media coverage then, suffice to say, it is bound to bomb.

Why is it then that the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference has fallen down this route? It may be that negotiations over what the conference will actually achieve are still ongoing. But even taking this into account there has been a severe lack of strategic organisation around the attendee list. Surely the UN still desperately wants world leaders to meet at Copenhagen, even if proposals are weaker than hoped for.

Firstly, organisers should have invited delegates months ago, the formal invitations should have gone out in the summer and the haggling over attendance should have taken place several months ago. Having left this element to the 11^th hour, there is a chance that at the last minute all goes to plan; but the conference has been tarnished by two months of speculation about the attendees. Still no formal invitations have been sent and so the press have no stories to run except intrigue about who might not attend and how the conference is breaking down.

Secondly, why is it that there has been such a breakdown between Barack Obama and the organisers? There have been rumours swirling for weeks that he may not attend. He has not come out and dispelled this myth and nor have any officials from the conference. Surely both Obama and the conference organisers realise how damaging this has been for the conference. Since September the image of the conference has changed from a landmark event to solve the biggest problem facing the planet to just another global conference, already destined to fail. Why have Obama’s spokespeople and the conference spokespeople not put up a united front in their messaging? Instead there has been division, which has made Obama, who has put tackling climate change at the centre of his promises, seem hypocritical and has made the conference seem impotent.

It is a tragic failure that a fantastic event such as the Copenhagen conference seems to have fallen because of communications failings. Even though there may still be successful resolutions coming out of Copenhagen, I think the negotiations will be all the harder with such an intense media glare waiting for the conference to fail. In fact this negative pre-conference atmosphere might scupper this magnificent opportunity for global dialogue on climate change and cast Copenhagen into the vast pile of what if? moments in history.

Let me know what you think. Should the UN have tried harder to commit world leaders to attend Copenhagen?

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in man-made climate change and I think governments across the world need to make some hard decisions very, very quickly if we are to stave off a disaster with worldwide implications. And I can understand why some people think Governments are working too slowly to prevent climate change related chaos because, in my opinion, they are.

But, what are the Climate Camp and other organisations like Plane Stupid protesters trying to achieve? Sure, throwing green custard on Peter Mandelson was a little bit funny, managing to scale the House of Commons to unfurl their banner was a reasonably impressive publicity stunt and their earlier protests against the third runway at Heathrow and the Drax coal-fired power station had some merit.

But the fact is stunts like these are only going to start to really doing some damage to their campaigns. Blocking streets, stopping people from working aren’t going to make people sympathetic for their cause. In fact, it is probably going to start to really piss people off (pardon my French).

And unfortunately, we all remember the scenes of the G20 protests in April that saw police use excessive force, but let’s face it, not all of the protesters were totally innocent.

I also get the impression that even some of the more reasonable protests always seem to deteriorate into a festival atmosphere. That isn’t going to impress average working people who are the ones that need to be convinced increasing their taxes and cost of fuel bills will be worth it in the end.

Even Greenpeace, which has in the past been known to pull some pretty impressive stunts themselves (one of my favourites is below after the Pasha Bulker tanker ran aground on the beach of Newcastle Australia), haven’t really been publicly involved with the latest Climate Camp protests.

I’d be really interested in your thoughts as to whether the Climate Camp protesters are helping raise awareness surrounding climate change, or if they are just kids who are doing more damage than good.

Cross posted with Shot across the bow