Saturday, 25 April 2015

My WWF Posters Rationale

The point of my practical response will be to demonstrate a solution to negative print campaigns for WWF, as they will hopefully demonstrate more problem solving skill than the guilt and fear campaigns that charities too commonly use. This will back up the idea I raised in my essay that currently their isn't much effort put into charity advertising.

None of the WWF campaigns I've found are particularly positive. The below 2 are about as positive as they come.

















Neither of them are particularly positive at all, more neutral than anything else, and because of this I would argue that they're less effective than even the negative ones.

 

 

None of these campaigns give the audience any positive encouragement to donate and no proof that their contribution is making a difference.

My posters will reverse this using positive imagery and messages to convince people that their donation is a good investment rather than a system to remove them of guilt.

Peoples reactions to charity print campaigns I showed them suggest that the following things worked well in guilt and fear campaigns:

  • Black and white images
  • Brutal images
  • Leading questions
  • Small amounts of text
  • Clear negative statistics

Subverting these things would logically avoid these guilty connotations, so I'm going to base my posters around images of baby animals as they have the cute and cuddly connotations that make people feel warm inside. It's important that they're of baby animals, as babies represent progress against extinction. A positive message will be clearly displayed alongside these images though to avoid taking advantage of this with guilt. Given that clear negative statistics work to induce guilt, using clear positive statistics should provide encouragement that a donation is a good investment. 

Photographs like these summarise this positivity.


















The images alone don't make you want to donate to WWF, and so using them doesn't contradict my hypothesis, because the skill involved will be contextualising the images into a commercial environment where the images aren't being negatively exploited.

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