PSAs - Is the Guilt Trip Ever a Good Idea?

As I mentioned earlier, I will be entering the TAG awards in the near future. I had the privilege of working with an absolutely fantastic team, which consists of one other copywriter and two designers.

At the moment, our advert is in post-production, but I will share it as soon as it is complete.

The NGO that we chose to do for our public-service annoouncement, was the Organ Donor Foundation, or ODF.

We chose this organisation, because all the other NGOs that we found were all fairly obvious: animal abuse, women abuse, drug rehabilitation etc. While there is no denying that these issues are very serious and should not be ignored in any way whatsoever, we felt that Organ Donation would be more of a challenge. Everyone knows how they feel about animal-abuse, but not everyone is sure on their stance when it comes to organ donation. Some are for it, some are against it, and others (like me, before I started working on this brief) sit somewhere in the middle.

What we weren't aware of, however, when we chose to do the ODF, was that well-known Cape Town agency Lowe Bull created an ad for them last year....and it won the competition.

So while we had a great NGO to promote, we had a LOT to live up to. The interesting part of this story (which is the point of the article) is the debate on what makes a great ad. This advert won the TAG awards, but the response that the ODF received when it aired was far from positive. People complained that it was too emotive, too patronising and too personal. It was removed from air, and the ODF did not see significant improvement in registrations after it aired.

It's all very well to say it was a great ad, but if it didn't achieve its aim, can we really give it any credit?

PSAs, and not just the advert that Lowe Bull created, often seem to do this though. We often see serious issues being sold to us using guilt and fear as the vehicle.

And is that really all that effective? I think not. Well, not in the majority of cases, anyway.

If anyone has any feedback regarding this topic, I'd love to hear it.

Alex