Studio Task 4 - Practice-Based Research Session

What is the role of ethics in contemporary charity advertising and the techniques they use?

Techniques

• Fear-induction: What is acceptable to show in the media? What are the most effective forms of fear campaigns?
• Guilt appeals: Are images or text most prominent?
• Leading questions: Key words/phrases that make people more convinced of something?
• Use of presenters: How is an appropriate presenter identified?
• Shocking images: Big pictures draw peoples attention, shocking pictures keep their attention.
• Statistical evidence: Which way of presenting statistics is most convincing?
• Subversion: How far can you take something before it becomes irrelevant?
• Social snobbery: Does making people feel more empowered necessarily make them more likely to help out?
• Relating issues to humans: Making a human connection makes people more sympathetic and increases empathy.
• Rhetoric based justification of message: How can the campaign justify its excessively guilt/fear-inducing content?

Content

• Recommendations for beating the problem that are achievable and effective: Does telling people what they need to do make them more likely to change their behaviour?
• Use/abuse of celebrity status and its influence: How can the addition of a public figure change the way a message is shown?
• Subverted images of well recognised things (pandas, rhinos etc): Is putting things in a different context an appropriate way of putting a message across? Does it fully inform the audience of the new context?
• Imagery that scares people: What are people scared of?
• Facts and figures that shock/surprises people: What sort of statistics make people want to take action?
• Subdued colours that show a serious tone: Where is the balance found between using bright colours to draw attention and dark colours to suggest a serious tone of voice.

Communication

• Exploiting insecurities: How do people react to advertising making them feel insecure? Is it really appropriate to do?
• Capitalises on high self-confidence: Does self confidence really have that much of an effect on how likely someone is to help a charity? 
• Leads people to a dictated solution: Are people more likely to agree with someone if the conversation is one-sided?
• Tends to interact with large audiences: More people told means more people will respond.
• Very intense tone, mostly serious: Makes clear to people that the issue is serious.

Proposal For Practical Research

The conclusion for my essay was that there isn't much ethical pressure put on charity advertising, and I put this down to people thinking that charities can get away with anything just because they're charities.

For my practical work I'm going to take a charity campaign and a commercial campaign for a multi-national company like Coca-Cola and McDonalds and reversed the techniques used in the adverts. To decide what charity advert to use, I'll do some research into some of the highlighted areas above so the campaign I use will be sure to be one that does a good job of either guilting or scaring people. I'll do this by showing people various groups of adverts and asking which one affects them most, and I'll try and pick out common factors between the chosen results. 

The particular areas I want to focus on are; key words/phrases, leading questions/one sided conversation, celebrity presenters, and format of statistics/facts, as this will give me a good cross section of information to dictate the content of my own adverts. Using these answers will also help me pick out a corporate advert to base my own adverts on, as I'll pick one that doesn't use any of the features that people highlight as making them feel guilty or scared.

The most appropriate format will be billboards, as big companies and charities shared main advertising platforms are television adverts and billboards, and I don't feel like I'd know how to make a TV advert.