assessment

ASA and charity adverts

  What do these terms mean? And how are they related to advertising?

	Definition
Legal	Permitted/related to the law.
Ethical	relating to moral principles or the branch of knowledge dealing with these

Recap – who are the ASA? What do they do?

Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is the self-regulatory organisation of the advertising industry in the United Kingdom. The ASA is a non-statutory organisation and so cannot interpret or enforce legislation.

Read through the ASA codes specially aimed at charities. Highlight and summarise the key findings that charity advertisements must adhere to

Charity advertisements: An understanding of advertising content

Read and highlight the information below. Summarise what you have learnt in the table.

The Ideal Victims

●        Charity campaigns constitute a very unique type of advertising, since they attempt to generate action on the behalf of the sufferers.

●        In order to serve this cause, these texts attempt to manipulate the audience’s internal emotions and intend to generate responsibility and feelings of compassion or sympathy using images of suffering others.

●        According to Kinsey(1987) advertisers have a longstanding awareness of the fact that images of particular sufferers can be especially effective in getting audience’s attention.

●        Taking into consideration the fact that the proximity created by the media constitutes both social and physical approximation, and donating is a form of pro-social behaviour (any action intended to help others - the desire to help others with no expectation of reward), spectators may feel more inclined to donate when particular sufferers are presented.

●        Christie (1996: 384) defines the ‘ideal victim’ as a ‘person or a category of individual who when hit by crime, most readily is given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim’.

●        Höijer (2004: 517) notes that in general, children, mothers and the elderly are more suitable as ideal victims than men, since solely in the case that victims are identified as genuine and real, and thus are connected with innocence, they comprise candidates for compassion.

●        Pictures can generate compassion for two reasons: these victims are perceived as more vulnerable by respondents and thus deserve their help, or respondents may feel more compassionate about these sufferers through their own experience of being more open or vulnerable.

Negative versus Positive Appeals

●        A considerable number of consumer research studies agree that negative information and images are more attention-grabbing and convincing than positive communication efforts

●        The effectiveness of negative appeals is mainly attributed to the fact that they are more likely to breach spectator’s expectations, by moving beyond messages that are framed in a positive way, thus generating greater scrutiny

●        These appeals render the viewer a witness of the horror of suffering

  When people are confronted with threats of undesirable future social alterations, they tend to adjust their behaviour in an attempt to deter the threat, which most of the times leads them to support the cause of the charity

●        On the other hand, the use of negative appeals has been the subject of severe criticism. At the centre of these critiques is the argument that these images, by dehumanizing the sufferers, are for the most part responsible for causing sentiments of compassion fatigue to the audience

●        However, despite criticisms against them, evidence suggests that this is still the most efficient way of appealing for imperative action – hence its long-lasting existence in the public communication of suffering

●        ‘Positive appeal’ campaigns reject the representation of sufferers as helpless victims and focus on their agency and dignity.

●        Advertisements incorporating positive messages are more effective since they result in the spectator feeling more favourable towards their subject

●        Moreover, positive appeal images offer the spectators the opportunity to watch the results of their actions. Getting to see that their actions can actually lead to substantial change in the sufferers’ lives, highly motivates viewers to undertake the actions suggested by the advertisements

●        However, ‘positive appeals’ approach is not without disadvantages. It has been argued that these images as well, generate a different type of-compassion fatigue. Showing smiling faces of children, creates an impression that ‘everything is already taken care for’ (Small, 1997: 581-593), while these images may ultimately lead to inaction based on the assumption that ‘these are not really people in need’

Type of Action

●        Most times charity advertisements request for monetary donations so as to fund the work of NGOs. These requests can be segmented into requests regarding a specified amount, requests for an unspecified amount, requests for a bequest etc.

●        Loyal donors that develop long term relations with aid organisations are more likely to respond positively to any type of request, than those who are uncommitted

●        Requests for money that do not specify the amount are less likely to generate positive responses, since donors consider them as less concrete and trustworthy.

●        When the donor is only given the opportunity to respond to suffering by offering money, this could impede his/her moral response.

●        Particularly significant to the issue of audience’s reaction to humanitarian appeals is Cohen’s research on denial (Cohen, 2001; Cohen & Seu, 2002). Taking a different approach, Cohen focuses on what he calls the ‘black hole of the mind, a blind zone of blocked attention and selfdeception’ (Cohen 2001: 6), referring to the different ways of avoidance people use to shelter themselves from unpleasant realities and their responsibility towards the sufferers. Following Van Dijk (1992), Cohen crucially asserts that denial may appear in different forms: from defensive strategy to a strategy of normalisation and neutralisation.

The Ideal Victim	Charity adverts have unique advertising Aim to manipulate audience’s emotions by showing images of sufferers the ‘ideal victim’ is a ‘person or a category of individual who when hit by crime, most readily is given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim’. children, mothers and the elderly are more suitable as ideal victims than men, since solely in the case that victims are identified as genuine and real, and thus are connected with innocence
Negative versus Positive Appeals	negative information and images are more attention-grabbing When people are confronted with threats of undesirable future social alterations, they tend to adjust their behaviour in an attempt to deter the threat the use of negative appeals has been the subject of severe criticism as they dehumanized the sufferers the most efficient way of appealing for imperative action Positive appeal’ campaigns reject the representation of sufferers , ‘positive appeals’ approach is not without disadvantages. It has been argued that these images as well, generate a different type of-compassion fatigue. Showing smiling faces of children, creates an impression that ‘everything is already taken care for’
Types of Actions	These requests can be segmented into requests regarding a specified amount, requests for an unspecified amount, requests for a bequest aid organisations are more likely to respond positively Requests for money that do not specify the amount are less likely to generate positive responses, since donors consider them as less concrete and trustworthy.

Look at the following charity advertisements. Using all your knowledge of advertising – legal and ethical issues, the law, advertising techniques, the 4Ps, USP, advertising content – annotate why these charity adverts were banned.

ASA 2012 Report

People in the UK had a number of concerns about charity adverts they saw on TV; these were:

•       can go too far in their portrayal of violence, suffering or hardship

•       often make people feel guilty or uncomfortable in a way they considered inappropriate, especially ones [that are graphic] distressing and even offensive

•       [graphic/shocking ads] are particularly problematic if encountered unexpectedly or repeated excessively

•       Targeted their children (in particular anim al welfare ads) and put pressure on parents to donate money or do something about the issue

•       Appear on children’s channels

•       Prompted children to ask parents to adopt pets from shelters

•       Affected children emotionally or led to conversations that were not necessarily age-appropriate

Look back at the advertising techniques that are successfully used in adverts. Which ones do you think apply specifically to charity adverts? Why?

Vulnerable characters – audiences feel sorrier for them as they are innocent

Direct address – Speaks to the audience and is more personal

Emotive language – to make the audience aware of what is happening to the victims

Capital letters – Stands out more

Relatable – The audience is more likely to donate if it affects them personally so by being relatable it targets the viewer individually

Music Video Essay question

Music Video Analysis

• There's an entire "rap" culture in America right now where the content of the songs is how rich one is, how many drugs one is doing, how many people one is shooting, how one has so much Gucci, etc. These artists are getting hundreds of millions of views and underneath what they are focused on in their songs, there is so much suffering and violence happening and Gambino is saying in America everyone is brushing the suffering under the rug and talking about how expensive their shoes are or doing a new trending dance that is in.
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• It could also be trying to say that some people love black culture when it comes to dope beats, dance crazes, and style. But when deeper issues come up: racism, violence towards blacks, appropriation, etc...they look the other way
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• They place the guns carefully on red cloths. This is such a subtle but glaring criticism of the fact that even after such atrocities we still value such deadly weapons over the lives of innocents. Every time a gun is used to take a life, it’s handled with the utmost care. It’s not a new statement, but the idea that guns and gun ownership are more precious than human life is something that can’t be expressed with enough rage.
• Rather than pay attention to the problems around them, the children ignore the chaos in favor of being copying whatever dance move Childish does. They’re too busy to be bothered with the problems around them that are going to affect them once the dancing stops. They do this through blurring our the background and keeping the camera focus on Childish.
• Also, the children being sheltered from Childish’s violence and then brought back into the light is a wicked commentary on the seedy underbelly of how the powerful operate.
  
• It could be seen as an assault on escapism and the current state of hip-hop. It’s to point out the line between escapism and irresponsibility.
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• The main focus of the video features Childish dancing in various states — him having fun, to imitations of Jim Crow-era blackface performers. Meanwhile, all around him, there is utter chaos and confusion. The use of this intertextuality is meant to make you think as not everyone will recognise it or understand until you take a closer look and research into it. which relates the moral of the video.
• In the end, after a video full of goofy dancing to distract us from the problems in the world, we're left with the image of petrified Childish sprinting for his life from everything he'd been ignoring. The terror on his face is chilling. It's also a loose thread that ensures the conversation will continue after the video cuts to black.
• The cars near the end could all model what belonged to the victims of traffic related police brutality.
• The black women who appeared at the end could mean that they are the last to be considered in America.