Charity Ads: A More Mature Approach?
Kids Company by AMV.BBDO. Art direction/ design: Paul Cohen. Copywriter: Mark Fairbanks. Photography: Thom Atkinson
The unscrupulous among the advertising community have often tended to look upon charity accounts less as an opportunity to help those in need and more as a chance to help themselves. Is a more mature approach emerging?
Charity campaigns have often been taken on with the express intention of winning awards and, in order to do so, many have resorted to crude tactics. In the mid-90s when outrage over ‘shock advertising’ was at its peak, some of the worst offenders were for small charities many of which, miraculously, were never heard from before or since.
But perhaps there is something of a more mature approach emerging. Take, for example, recent print campaigns by This Is Real Art for Reprieve and AMV.BBDO’s new campaign for Camilla Batmanghelidjh’s Kids Company plus, from slightly further back, CHI’s Prince’s Trust work and BBH’s Barnardo’s campaign from last year.
Reprieve by This is Real Art. Art director/copywriter:
Paul Belford
BBH for Barnardo’s from 2007. Creatives: Nick Gill and Mark Reddy. Photographer: Kiran Master
The first thing that occurs with these campaigns is the amount of copy used. It’s not so long ago that we were all bemoaning the death of long copy in advertising. And yet all four campaigns use lengthy, discursive texts to make their case: in Kidsco, the copy runs to nearly 400 words. The style is conversational.
Copy from KidsCo ad above
All four campaigns go for a factual, documentary style of layout, aping editorial or, in the case of Reprieve, the visual language of bureaucracy. The use of typewriter fonts in Kidsco (Letter Gothic Medium) and Reprieve reinforces the documentary feel.
Reprieve ad copy
Headlines have a similarly editorial look, even working with standfirsts in the typical language of a magazine spread, while the photography studiously avoids sensationalism, particularly Kiran Master’s shots for Barnardo’s. The Reprieve campaign even obscures its shocking imagery, letting our imaginations do the work.
The art directors for KidsCo (Paul Cohen) and for Reprieve and Prince’s Trust (Paul Belford) are noted for a more considered approach - one that seeks to reject the tired formulae of typical advertising art direction (big picture, punning headline etc).
These campaigns attempt to engage with the mind more than the heartstrings, patiently arguing a reasoned case instead of lurching into a stop-them-in-their tracks visual assault. It’s a welcome change.
Prince’s Trust by Clemmow Hornby Inge, 2007. Art director: Paul Belford. Copywriter: Nigel Roberts. Photography: Adam Hinton.
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Some good copy here, but the images spin on that fear people have when they see teenagers, black or otherwise. It kind of says, you’re right, this kid on the bike/in the hat/by the bus stop that scares you is, as you assumed, completely fucked up and may just mug you. Scurry away.
As a society we hate our children, we hate our teenagers: we don’t want their clubs near us, their housing projects, their services or their hanging out places: we fear them, and stuff like this compounds these feelings. I think it would be more interesting, more challenging, to create and use images that provide a counter to the bad things kids do: because no kid is all bad. So why not surprising, intimate images? Why this alienated fear stuff, which just confirms what people think they know?
It’s just no good having a bit of pithy copy and hoping to carry people to a new understanding, because the image you’ve just used, which is more powerful than words and will stay with them much longer, has already confirmed their existing fear and prejudice.
In a way these ads are like almost all charity advertising - a rush of excitement and simplistic outrage on the part of creatives who normally sell financial services and other important things, and who only ever manage a vague emotional connection with a cause, which flares briefly in their work but has little wider political or moral dimension to it. The next week they are back on the money accounts, curiously cleansed and satisfied by their brief contact with a few weirdy people from a charity.
So; interesting, but not more mature, just pro bono.
rob alcraft
01/Dec/08, 6:07 pm