Fire Safety Ad

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ophelia

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Is it me, or does anybody else find the latest fire safety ad a bit offensive? It takes the form of an Anne Robinison style character (but oddly wearing a pixie-style outfit and red-rimmed glasses), chastising a group of people in a grey smokey room. These poor and very unhappy looking 'souls', we are lead to believe have passed on, having died in house fires of some sort. She goes through each individual, saying things in a very condescending way like 'Who forgot to change the batteries in the smoke alarm then'? or 'Forgot to close the doors downstairs before going to bed, did we '?.
For anybody who lost a loved one in a house fire I would imagine that this kind of safety promotion through guilt could only add to their sorrow. I feel it is playing on the overwhelming grief and sense of blame that family left behind must feel - something that is neither fair or appropriate. Haven't complained formally about it but I am thinking about it. Surely there are more factual and helpful methods of getting the fire safety message across.
 
ophelia said:
Surely there are more factual and helpful methods of getting the fire safety message across.
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Maybe these methods haven't worked sufficiently in the past. Do you have the same objections to the harrowing kinds of road safety adverts as well?

I personally believe that these adverts are necessary to really make people sit up and think.

Bringing families of deceased into arguements such as this is unhelpful. They'll have their grief no matter what kind of adverts there are.

They'll be reminded of their deceased loved ones by photographs, by newspaper stories of similar incidents, by tv reports also, and by just thinking of those people. We can't protect everyone from everything.
 
I agree Ronan, Emotion will trump logic every time in advertising this sort of thing. The new advert about child safety in cars is very good and plays on emotion as well.
 
I feel that this kind of emotive advertising may get our attention for all of five seconds, but what happens when we become immune to shock tactics. Eventually reason and education will prevail. I also dislike the road safety ads especially the new one where they very 'lovingly' state that in the event of an accident 'a childs brain will be pulped'.
How much does an advertising campaign of this nature cost?
Far better to employ health promotion officers in schools and workplaces and educate in a sublime continious form rather than flash in the pan upsetting ads that serve no purpose but to upset.
 
ophelia said:
I feel that this kind of emotive advertising may get our attention for all of five seconds, but what happens when we become immune to shock tactics.
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I think you're misunderstanding the intention of as you call it, emotive advertising.

You will find experts in the advertising world who will tell you that it is emotions that drive the decision making of people who are exposed to advertising. Memory, on the otherhand, is deemend not a good thing to appeal to via advertising.

For this reason, emotive advertising, while it may cease to have what you call "shock tactics", it is thought to be more likely to inform our decision making processes than any kind of memory activities, such as the training and education you advocate.

ophelia said:
How much does an advertising campaign of this nature cost?
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ophelia said:
Far better to employ health promotion officers in schools and workplaces and educate in a sublime continious form rather than flash in the pan upsetting ads that serve no purpose but to upset.
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What relevance has your first question, when your second statement would be significantly more expensive in both time and money, and would have possibly less impact, based on my original comments above.
 
I think we need these type of adverts.
Having spent the last five years, trying to explain the necessity of car seats to an unreceptive family member I had the joy of being asked for my old car seat for her grand child after she watched the aforementioned ad.

It worked for her where five years of reasoning and explaining did not.

The fatc that someone may have lost a relative in a house fire would be all the more reason for them to understand the necessity to show people how fires can be prevented.

Facts and logic are more easily ignored than human stories.
 
The ASAI are not a statutory body. They are a self-appointed industry group whose only power is to name-and-shame. The BCC have teeth.
 
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