Problem solving

I think that it is quite amusing that we attempt to use advertising to solve a problem that is in some ways a product of advertising – namely excessive consumption of alcohol. Take a little walk around Westland’s and you cannot avoid the basic message that pretty much every billboard screams at you – drink more booze!

Of course the consumption of alcohol, and all manner of other narcotic substances, greatly predates the rise of advertising in it’s modern form – though no doubt word soon spread across the ridges if a particularly potent brew was to be had at Njuguna’s place…

I’m not blaming advertising for the problem of drink driving in Kenya. They advertise vodka off the hook in Sweden but Swedes do not decimate themselves on the roads to the same extent that we do. There are all manner of issues to do with the standards of our roads, the standards of our cars and the standards of our cops that contribute to the problem, but these are another subject.

The question here is this: how can you use advertising to solve the problem of drink driving? The ad here tries to work on the basis of logic. It attempts to convince the reader at an intellectual level that driving drunk is a foolish thing to do. Of course the problem with this is that the first thing to go when one gets drunk is one’s intellectual capacities… I have no doubt that the vast majority of people who drive drunk would tell you, when sober, that it’s a foolish thing to do… but that doesn’t mean that they don’t proceed to drive once they are drunk.

As with life, advertising comes in one of two forms: the positive and the negative. Another way of putting this is that adverts will tend to either ride on hopes or prey on fears. Thus the ad for the deo where the guy gets all the girls once he has sprayed it on rides on his hopes, whilst the ad where the girl doesn’t get the guy until she uses the skin lightening cream (truly evil) preys on her fears.

Anti-smoking ads tend to be very much based on people’s fears – here’s a big picture of a diseased lung, stop smoking now! The opposite of this would be a pro-breathing ad, in which a choir sings in full voice about the wonders of a chest-full of air.

It’s a very tricky issue/decision: should you try and scare people into sensibility – a big picture of a mangled wreck and a headless body – or should you try and engage them in a rational adult conversation about reaction times and blurred vision?

I maintain that advertising is all about positioning – that is placing a particular product, service, brand or idea in a particular position in the collective mind – and the mind is collective.

Drunk driving is a behavior-type. Therefore, the correct question is where to position this behavior-type in the collective mind? Smoking is a behavior-type. For years it was positioned as the epitome of cool. The effect of several decades of anti-smoking campaigns has been to position it as the epitome of stupidity, although it does still maintain some associations with rebellion, especially amongst the young.

The mistake that this ad makes is that it attempts to position drunk driving as illogical. As mentioned above, I don’t think that anyone doubts this. ‘Illogicity’ is hardly powerful territory, there isn’t that much emotional oomph… Further, this ad miss-understands what drives us as social animals – logic is a personal matter. Social behaviors are a function of socially accepted norms. Thus I would say that the target of this ad should not be the individual but rather the society as a whole, and the objective should be to re-position the behavior as unacceptable.

All societies maintain order within them on the basis of implicit and explicit rules. The latter are managed by a judicial system of some form – elders, courts, waganga – whilst the former are the territory of shame, that most powerful of controlling social forces.

Therefore what this ad needs to do is to make drunk drivers feel a sense of shame at their behavior – noting of course that alcohol serves to accentuate inner feelings. The way you create shame is not by talking to the recipients of it but rather to its ‘givers’ – the society at large. Thus the ad needs to be encouraging the wider public to take action to shame drink drivers when they come upon them - it should star a drunk driver who has been stripped naked by a crowd and had the word ‘moron’ written on his chest with lipstick.

OK maybe that shouldn’t be the ad, but the point is that it’s the crowd in this example that needs to be the target audience, not the naked moron.

Humans hate to be lectured to, which is why this ad won’t work, be we hate even more to be ridiculed by our peers – www.slapadrunkb*#*h.co.ke.