How Emotions Shape Our World. (4)

Clubbing us over the head: excerpts from actual campaigns

Here are excerpts from actual ad campaigns that might infuriate or fall flat with me if, in becoming a confused consumer, I am retreating into my Neanderthal sensibility.

Insurance company

This out-of-home campaign features not only pictures of an insurance card, but the torn-out excerpt of a Summary Plan of Benefits, replete with linear, Vulcan phraseology. This provider also prominently featured the word "colonoscopy" in recent ads appearing on buses and bus shelters. This campaign emphasizes bureaucratic process and procedure, with a little scary, technical terminology thrown in for good measure.

Hospital system

On billboards, this hospital system makes strides by showing human faces, but the faces of stock photo models — not mine, nor those I could interpret as being my family’s, and mostly Caucasian I might add — with technical terms like “surgeon” and “cardiac center” floating above. Showing people is good, but consumers can easily sniff out and disregard what is too obviously stock art. And again, we can't seem to get away from technical terms that focus on the scary procedure instead of on the positive, human outcome.

HMO

This one shows a folksy, retro-inspired illustration of a dirty hand, and tells me to wash mine. This is part of a campaign whose launch featured giant, anthropomorphic specimen cups and syringes. The effort to use unique design — albeit representing the same, overtly medical subjects — is laudable in a market flooded with its opposite. It's a step forward. Somehow, the message went in the opposite direction, seeming paternalistic and slightly demeaning.

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How Emotions Shape Our World. (5)

The McKinsey Quarterly says, “Consumers are confused, concerned, and uncertain about their health insurance and financing needs. Companies should listen to them.”

This confusion and concern extends from health care financing to health itself. I’m scared and confused by my symptoms. Won’t somebody listen to me?

The camera pulls back again to the pale blue dot, that mote of dust suspended in the sunbeam. In the vast cosmic plane, where our shouts could echo on forever, or land with another person, forming interlacing connections that give solid shape to the emptiness, it’s the presence of some listener that makes a universe of difference.

Listen to me! The first tools (provided by the influence of weird, unexplained monoliths) serve not to build shelters or get food but express existential rage in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, 1968

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A quick look at what good looks like.

What A.L. has said so far.
A summary argument for better health care creative

1.
Mostly, Americans have done the best with what they have.

2.
Busy (and broke) as some of us are, much of what we have is cheap, convenient, and
comforting.

3.
Can you blame us? Apparently, yes. Much of public- and consumer-health messaging pushes individual accountability in pedantic tones, telling us to "do" or "not do" things it defines as "healthy."

4.
In fact, eating, drinking, and smoking are exactly what American society and our economy tells us to do. We're encouraged to be consumers. So we consume.

5.
Landmark research suggests a better approach. Better than merely blaming us for our own bad habits, public health messaging can reveal the ways food and consumer product manufacturers haven't always given us healthy choices...

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A quick look at what good looks like. (2)

6.
....For example, foods are loaded with super-simple carbohydrates, nasty oils, coloring. These additives manipulate our bodies' powerful abilities to use flavor/cravings as indicators for foods we need. Granted, we're adults. We can take some responsibility for overlooking these ingredients, often found, however, in cheap, quick foods that satisfy a real need for the cash-strapped. But, what about kids?

Are kids' bodies being programmed for a taste for fake food? Is it harder and harder for stressed-out parents to battle the onslaught of messaging, not just for junk food, but junk recreation, that encourages kids to sit idly in front of TV, PC, and Wii screens?

Messaging that unites us in a shared motivation to counter the ploys of manufacturers creates a grass roots movement. Grass roots movements influence markets as well as policy. Ultimately, research suggests, they drive widespread change by getting us to think socially and politically as well as individually.

Social media are channels we can explore to take a socially-driven approach to moving society forward.

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A quick look at what good looks like. (3)

7.
As much as we can think about people in groups, there's still great value in thinking about them as individuals. This is a time-tested strategy for effective advertising. Advertising has changed. It's become more about listening-to than telling. Let's listen to the genuine fear and confusion people are experiencing about health care. Anthropologist Meredith Small says people are emotional beings. Appeals to rationality may infuriate or fall flat withconsumers. Health-care-speak is an example. McKinsey Quarterly says we should listen to and reassure them.

8.
Examples from high-profile health campaigns (see "Clubbing us over the head...") show us
what not-so-good looks like.

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A quick look at what good looks like. (4)

9.
What good might look like:

• Tell stories using humor, metaphors, and images, restating health care in a form that speaks to consumers' psyche as advertisees rather than propagandees. The latter is more easily tuned out.
• Show you're listening and offer reassurance.
• Employ social media, with a plan. Find the places where people naturally assemble to talk about health stuff, where you can listen to their fears and questions and provide answers ---- answers they'll pass on, rather than being force-fed information that stops there.
• Use content and editorial. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Digg are transforming our tastes. We want news. We're looking for "updates," personal updates from people we know as well as from the world at large.

All of these ideas are founded in the same climate that has spawned social media. Social media help marketers, of which health care leadership is one example, build relationships in the same way we build relationships with each other. We remove blame and recognize each other's emotions. We can recognize that people essentially do the best with what they have. We can give them more.

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Landmark Research on Health Advertising Reveals the Pitfalls of Preaching

The problem of pushing individual accountability as a way to sell” good” health behaviors

People are great. In spite of our misguided moments, we’re generally trying to do best by ourselves, our families, and if we can swing it, by our neighbors and our communities.

If you share this basic belief, you might be troubled by the tone that creeps into a lot of consumer health messages. These messages suggest America’s trillion-dollar health care problem is our fault, because we eat Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, smoke, drink, sit on the couch, or forget to get our blood pressure checked.

The messaging I’m talking about often emphasizes individual accountability for “better health behaviors.” The object of the communication is a mysterious cabal of unhealthy Americans, kind of like Reagan’s Welfare Mothers, whom it demonizes.

Media studies suggest focusing on individual accountability is not only ineffective, but worse, avoids targeting social and economic factors that may be the underlying causes of health problems.

The study in question, Advertising Health: The Cause for Counter-Ads, is actually about a form of advertising recommended by many public health, communications, and media experts. Personally, I don’t love counter ads, which generally include some form of attack against an organization or institution. However true, any message posed as a negative risks not asserting a positive. I think positives reflect better on the speaker as a brand foundation for ongoing messaging.

But the real revelation of this study is not so much the specifics of the counter ad format. It’s the underlying approach, which is significant in the way that it avoids targeting the individual. Rather, it builds affinity with the audience, pitting viewers as unwitting players in a bigger but unbalanced story, one with inequities that that can now be righted.

So—rather than saying, “Hey, stop eating so many carbs, fatty,” we can say, “Foodmakers mix secret ingredients into everyday foods that taste just fine by themselves.” The ad could go on to reveal the shocking number of unnecessary calories contained in mega-carb additives. The tone could bear some enlightened outrage at the challenge to our independence posed by producers, who try to inform our sense of what tastes good.

This approach works better, the study suggests, because it raises the attention of communities and institutions whose programs, support or legislation can help attack the real problem. It led to things like the creation of food labels, for example.

I think this approach works better not because it leads to more legislation, but because, as the recipient of it, I don’t resent the message. It doesn’t judge me for my waistline or my habits. It doesn’t assume I have the time or income to spend two hours at the gym or buy organic foods. It has some compassion for my position but also makes me feel like I have power and choice.

Mostly, it doesn’t judge me for the ill effects of being a Consumer (think about the real meaning of that word), which is exactly what government and industry want me to be.

Here’s an ad I’d love to see. We hear a quirky, fast-paced, techno-carnival soundtrack.
We follow one and then more everyday people trying to get through their everyday lives despite a barrage of comforts and conveniences, all of which impede their natural progress. (If you’ve ever been corralled onto a moving walkway in the airport to traverse the distance of only a couple gates, you’ll get what I mean).

Corporate health care is part of the same consumer system that continually peddles convenience. With a change in awareness, health care leaders can help extract the industry from this giant, idling hamster wheel. Health care can become a powerful agent of reform for our whole way of life.