Meth is a death sentence.
“Ben hanged himself when he couldn’t stop using it.” Want to change
others? Learn from Montana’s graphic techniques to stop the carnage. When the danger
is extreme the nudge may have to be too.
Even if you are attempting to nudge others in less dire situations you can glean lessons from these powerful ads.
Here
are four ways to make your message sink in and sway others:
1. Short sentences carry punch. “This is where he went into convulsions.” So do pithy tag lines: “Not even once.”
2. Be more credible and memorable by using vivid, specific
everyday language, rather than jargon or generalizations. “This is the sink where
she started pulling out her eyebrows.”
"’Kevin’ dropped out of school, used sharp objects to remove
imaginary bugs from his body and now spends his days restrained to a bed.”
3. Use “sensory contrasts.” The dramatic background music and snippets of emotional voices stand in sharp contrast to the dulled, sad tones of the victims, the narrators – whose faces you only see at the end of each advertisement. (Not seeing the narrator until the end builds anticipation.)
4. Show some visual detail AND leave some to the imagination. While you see some of the scenes where awful things happened and you hear snippets of voices in those situations you don’t see the worst things - except in your mind’s eye. Don’t express the outrage. Instead present the reason your audience will feel it and express the emotion that may move them to change.
Hint: When you create a written, audio or video message, leave gaps for them to instinctively fill in the rest. This is akin to a speaker repeating a key phrase throughout a speech until that speaker can pause so the audience can say it for him. Their unavoidable participation glues them to your story.
Look for the brash book by Stanford business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't.
Hint: While collaboration is key in this increasingly complex, connected world, attempting to create it between competing organizations can be dangerous if one does not understand the use of power to first protect oneself and then to unite others in a common purpose.
"What makes power degenerative rather than generative? Lack of love What makes love degenerative? Lack of power." ~Adam Kahane, author of Power and Love
