#156 2016 · Sandy Hook Promise (with BBDO New York) · Public safety / violence preventionredesign-the-moment
A PSA about missed warning signs worked by making the audience miss them, live, on camera
the problem
Telling people to watch for warning signs doesn't teach them what those signs feel like to actually miss, because a list of signs presented as a list is nothing like encountering them buried in ordinary daily noise
background
Public-safety messaging about spotting a troubled or dangerous individual before violence happens typically takes the form of a list: here are the signs, watch for them. That format has a structural flaw — a list of warning signs, read attentively as a list, bears no resemblance to how those signs actually appear in real life: scattered, incidental, competing for attention against everything else happening around a person on an ordinary day. Telling someone what to look for doesn't train them to notice something when it's not labeled as the thing to look for.
Sandy Hook Promise and BBDO New York built 'Evan' as an ordinary-looking teen love story — a boy and girl's flirtation building across a school year, told through hallway passing-glances and background chatter, exactly the kind of foreground plot a viewer's attention is trained to follow. Every warning sign of a classmate planning a shooting — a gun magazine, a threatening social post, isolation, being bullied — appears the entire time, but only in the visual background the love story is staged in front of, never called out, never in focus.
the move
The film let viewers do exactly what real bystanders do: follow the obvious foreground story and miss the warning signs sitting in plain, unhighlighted sight the whole time. Only in the final seconds does on-screen text state 'While you were watching Evan, another student was showing signs of planning a shooting. But no one noticed' — turning the viewer's own attention lapse, which just happened to them in real time, into the demonstration of the problem, rather than describing the problem to them abstractly.
the payoff
'Evan' received over 150 million views, was named to Adweek's list of the 10 best ads of 2016, won multiple awards including recognition at Cannes, and drove what Sandy Hook Promise co-founder Mark Barden described as a major uptick in the organization's visibility, breaking out of advertising trade coverage into mainstream press including CNN and The New York Times.
what came after
'Evan' is a frequently cited case study in public-service advertising and behavior-change communication for demonstrating a cognitive failure experientially rather than describing it, and Sandy Hook Promise has continued producing PSAs using variations of the same structural trick (a familiar genre convention concealing warning signs in its background) in subsequent campaigns.
filed under
references
- [1]Fast Company — This PSA Focuses On 'The Other Side' Of Gun ViolenceFast Company, 2017fastcompany.com
- [2]Adweek — People Are Still Flipping Out About BBDO New York's 'Evan' Spot for Sandy Hook PromiseAdweek, 2016adweek.com