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Shock or Schmock?

By Samuel Tyler

“The Times They Are A-changin'” when it comes to mainstream media and as a throng of advertisers exploit shocking content in an attempt to garner a reaction from their audience, Bob Dylan’s 1964 song is still able to capture the spirit of the audience’s intended upheaval. Coined ‘shock advertising’, it can be described as the method of using nudity, violence, disconcerting imagery or words to provoke consumers’ attention or to thrust itself into the news agenda. But does showing an infant shooting up heroin or a woman’s grotesque, rotting, cancer-riddled mouth, attain the desired response from advertisers? Or are these shock tactics simply working against their causes and distancing advertisers from consumers?

In 2012, the average consumer was exposed to roughly 40,000 advertisements over the course of the year. It's predicted that they are able to recall less than 60 of these. With this figure in mind, it's easy to appreciate just how hard it is for advertisers to make their messages standout and provoke action amongst consumers – that’s when shock advertising comes into play. Shock advertising attempts to beat the odds by trying to force consumers to receive a message by shocking them with content not usually seen as socially acceptable or appropriate. They are strategically formulated with ideas and imagery that deviate from familiar advertising customs and have an explicit intent is to rouse alarm in those who witness them.

Shock advertising is a tool of choice for campaigns against binge drinking, smoking, drugs, and violence, or in some circumstances, a combination of these such as driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol. However, its use has also been seen in campaigns against political and religious groups, animal brutality, abortion, racism, social-inequality and meat consumption. Irrespective of its proven efficacy, industry experts argue that the pressure placed on advertisers to have their advertisements noticed is what underpins the growing use of shock advertising in today’s media. Now, while shock advertising may compel a consumer’s attention or make great dinner conversation, Chris Arnold (A punch in the face can offend) carefully explained “there is a fine line in what people find to be productive shocking and offensive to the public”.

One such example, balancing precariously between shocking and offensive, is the Australian “Break the Habit” commercial by The Precinct Studio. Released as a community service announcement online in October 2010, it features a mother preparing to inject her son with heroin before the scene inconspicuously changes to show the child eating a hamburger. The end tag then reads “You wouldn’t inject your children with junk, so why are you feeding it to them?” The commercial plays upon a variety of emotive hot buttons such as a child’s innocence, cold desolation and a parent’s responsibility to their child, to draw attention to the, alleged, epidemic of childhood obesity in Australia. Its intentional controversial subject matter directly targets parents who feed their children junk food despite the destructive, long-term effects it is known to cause. By comparing junk food with drugs, the commercial aims to put a dirty syringe in the hands of parents every time they go to feed their children junk food, giving them an opportunity to stop and think about their actions. Putting this accountability on parents, or as the advertisement draws them – junkie pimps, the syringe aims to manufacture a painful connection between junk food and chronic illnesses associated with childhood obesity. However, the advertisement fails to communicate a situation that consumers can realistically relate to. The typical parent watching is given a ‘get out of jail free’ card as soon as the mother begins cooking the heroin. Parents are able to tolerate the extremely shocking prospect of the mother injecting her child with drugs because, in contrast to jacking their own kids up on smack, their fast food feeding antics are completely exonerated. They think, “I’m not that bad” and don’t pay any attention towards the advertisement or allow it to infiltrate their emotions. In addition to this, if they cannot stand the prospect of watching they can look away, or stop the video, impeding the message and rendering the advertisement entirely ineffective.

So where does shock advertising draw the line? Ironically, Ray Black (Shock. Horror. FCUK...) relates shock advertising with drug addiction by saying, “like drugs, you have to increase the dose each time to get noticed by the viewers”. This highlights shock advertising’s effective capacity, like anything else in this world, to deteriorate with the passage of time and frequent viewing. When shock advertising loses its power, advertisers will need to produce a more explicit advertisement the next time in order to stand out. This holds advertisers captive in a cycle of trying to ‘one up’ not only the shock tactics of others, but themselves. It is clear to see that time itself is shock advertising’s kryptonite and with the regularity of shock tactics in today’s media, it is questionable whether their impact is as successful as it may once have been. Professor Alex Gardner, a psychologist and psychotherapist, explains, “Shocking advertisements traditionally worked because the message became so deeply lodged in a person’s consciousness that they were eventually forced to act upon it”, however he continues to note that if the same message and shock strategies are used regularly, they become part of a consumer’s normal advertising scenery thus making it easier to disregard.

A model of how consumers may react to shock advertising appeals, suggested by Dahlén, Rasch and Rosengren, has also shown that shock advertising can have the opposite effect of increasing attitudinal loyalty to a brand or cause. It shows how the initial exposure to an advertisement, which is deliberately shocking, will at first provoke some perceived violation to the expected norm, which then is cognitively processed. Once attention has been achieved, and the message is comprehended, a further elaboration of brand intent takes place, which may result in the message being immediately dismissed as the brain protects itself by blocking the information instead of memorising it. An explanation for this can be linked back to the basic consumer behaviour theory of ‘defendance’, whereby consumers convince themselves, after the fact, that the choice they made was the smart one by finding additional reasons to support the alternative they chose, or by discovering ‘flaws’ in the option they did not choose. This behaviour emphasises that as humans, consumers have a pathological desire to protect their ego against any attack on previous, or future decision making, to avoid and combat feelings of guilt. Therefore, advertisers need to recognise that shock for the sake of shock does not necessarily change behaviour and may do more bad than good.

An example of shock advertising that did more bad than good was the ‘Don’t turn a night out, into a nightmare’ campaign, which showed young people vomiting and falling about. According to Noel Turnbull, a professor in the School of Applied Communications at RMIT University, the advertising did not work as people “think they’re immortal” and “simply don’t believe the risks are as great as other people say”. He explained that the parent-child dialogue of denoting such behaviour as unacceptable was immediately blocked by the popular response of consumers viewing the party as the kind they actually wanted to attend. This completely countered the campaign’s objective of reducing binge drinking and unruly drunken behaviour amongst youths, by almost inspiring them to go out and seek such opportunities. Turnbull concluded by noting the growing trend of posting drunken photographs on Facebook, for what he describes as their need for gratification and acknowledgement for the behaviour. Considering consumers are free to choose how much and what they share online, it is difficult to imagine the kind of people sharing photos of themselves getting ‘maggoted’ on a Friday night being shocked, let alone discouraged by the token imagery in shock advertising.

So - does shock advertising really work, or what? Well unfortunately, no it doesn’t. Think of it like communism; fabulous in theory, not so fabulous in practice. Shock advertising caters to reason and the essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusion. If advertisers want consumers to have a change of heart rather than just a change of mind, they should focus on creating deep, positive emotional reactions. There are so many factors that affect the viability of shock advertising, from balancing what is productively shocking and what’s just plain offensive, to constructing realistic, relatable messages that consumers can connect with. In our current multimedia consumer age, even a perfect combination of these can so easily be interrupted by noise with consumers having the power to change channels, turn the page or simply look away. Advertisers also need to acknowledge the limitations of shock as a tool, as it is highly ineffective over time and with frequent exposures, to the point of it becoming an essential makeup of consumers' advertising landscape. In addition to this inadvertent classic conditioning, consumers constantly seek to protect their ego and defend their decisions, which places shock advertising in the role of a critical authority a consumer’s ego will naturally want to obstruct. But by far the most persuasive line of reasoning behind why shock advertising simply does not work is the evidence that it does more bad than good, by indulging consumers with sensationalism and inspiring a conflicting response or negative decision.

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