Why purposeful briefs give permission to ‘hit that nerve’

Is course correcting years of conditioning and deep-rooted behaviours a tougher brief than selling a mortgage and what’s involved with such a big project? Australian government’s Department of Social Services ad agency BMF discusses.

With behaviour change of sorts required from all advertising, whether that’s to swap vitamin brands, commit to your first mortgage or get a nation to understand the cycle of violence and the role they have in breaking it, the brief involves the “beautiful irrationality of humans”, says chief strategy officer at BMF Christina Aventi.

Bring Up Respect is the agency’s latest work for the Australian government’s Department of Social Services and highlights the importance of having regular proactive conversations about respect to nurture a culture that prevents disrespect manifesting into violence later on.

It’s phase four of a domestic violence prevention campaign that began in 2016.

Ms Aventi said the difference in social marketing versus a commercial project is that the behaviour-change tools “work a little harder and are a little more purposeful” to help you diagnose the problem behind “the” actual problem.

“Problems are like an iceberg, as cliched as that is, especially when it comes to deep-seated biases and heuristics,” Ms Aventi said. “What you see isn’t necessarily the real barrier you need to address. We are talking about years of conditioning which creates deep-rooted social norms that take a long time to undo and then rescript.”

She said when something like the foundational research for the overarching Stop It At The Start campaign comes your way, much like “the magic eye”, you have a sixth sense for what is really going on.

Christina Aventi, chief strategy officer at BMF

The new campaign culminates in six years of groundwork, which started with creative that starkly highlighted the issues around language that often excused bad behaviour – think “he just does it because he likes you”. The latest phase emphasises the positive impact teaching respect early on can have in the long run.

Ms Aventi said Kantar used the river analogy to describe the issue it needed to tackle, which was primary prevention upstream, not intervention downstream. She explained when people keep drowning in the river downstream and you’re exhausted trying to save person after person, the task at hand shifts when you go upstream and you can see one of the main causes. In this case, the cause is disrespect and by going upstream you can save more people in the long run.

The spots follow two children - Ava and Jack - through childhood and adolescence.

“The thing is we try to fix what we can see – end-stage violence – and that’s a very natural human bias. It’s harder to fix what we can’t see or identify with,” she said.

“But when going upstream it is harder to understand the link between the unwitting things we say and their contribution to end-stage domestic violence.”

It’s a long cause-and-effect chain from how something we say or do, such as “boys will be boys”, can contribute to something as unconscionable as domestic violence, but behind these are biases that excuse disrespect – such as empathising with males, minimising, or victim blaming.

Ms Aventi said it’s about resetting cultural norms that put biases into the disrespect category and showing what respect looks like and how it walks and talks to give people a new suite of behaviours to identify with.

Beautiful burdens, sobering briefs and need for the long idea

By letting things go unchecked, even if we only “do it a little bit”, when we all do it, this adds up and that’s what makes these the seeds of violence-supporting attitudes.

“We needed to subtly stigmatise so they don’t want to identify with it,” she said. This is different from commercial brands, Ms Aventi said, as “you are tapping it for good, you go harder at it” and you’ve got permission to hit that nerve, to champion, to stigmatise and to “rub out that knot with force”.

“Commercial brands don’t have the same permissions,” she said.

Course correcting years of conditioning and deep-rooted behaviours has to be taken step by step, which saw BMF break down the tasks and barriers and tackle them one by one.

“You can’t do it all, all at once. Transformation happens in marginal gains,” Ms Aventi said. “We needed to redefine disrespect and eradicate the problem behaviours before we could even start to encourage positive behaviours, like proactive conversations around respect in phase four.”

Pia Chaudhuri, executive creative director at BMF

Pia Chaudhuri, executive creative director at BMF, said the beauty of the latest phase of the campaign was that the idea remained intact throughout rigorous rounds of consumer testing, which is testament to its power.

In following the journey of its hero characters, Jack and Ava, from birth to age 17, Ms Chaudhuri said the craft decisions are designed to emphasise the impact of their learnings.

She explained how the slightly squarer 5:4 format is more intimate and feels like portraiture, which then allows the viewer to focus on characters and their emotions. “In each phase of the campaign, we’ve worked hard to make the films feel relatable. And while a lot of this is achieved through performance, it’s also in the styling, composition, and treatment of each shot,” Ms Chaudhuri said.

“We chose cinematic realism as our filmmaking genre – beautifully polished cinematography paired with the grit of real life.

“Finally, the sound design deliberately layers dialogue from our characters and atmospheric sounds from each scene, to add to the realness.”

On March 18 it was revealed that the initial $19 million for the latest stage of the ad campaign would be bolstered by an additional $46 million to ensure it reaches a larger audience.

Check out the past Stop It At The Start ads: