Beautiful burdens, sobering briefs and need for the long idea

While a reduction in the rate of violence cannot be seen immediately, evaluation research already indicates the Stop it at the Start ad campaign has already had an impact.

From sobering and gutting statistics on violence to the galvanising feeling of working towards something more purposeful, ad agency BMF’s long idea with its Department of Social Services client has been nothing short of a rewarding but mammoth task – and it’s not over yet.

Having launched the first phase of its Stop it at the Start domestic violence primary prevention campaign in 2016, a fourth phase of the DSS initiative is set to launch next year. BMF chief strategy officer Christina Aventi says this is a great example of how true behaviour change needs a clear pathway, patience and a step-by-step approach.

As far back as 2015 the Australian government committed to change the unsettling reality that if you were a female Australian over the age of 15, violence from an intimate partner was your most likely cause of preventable death, disability and ill-health.

More unsettling still was the realisation that many young Australian men and women in their formative years (ages 10 to 17) held violence-supporting attitudes, with one in four thinking it was serious if a guy who was normally gentle sometimes slapped his girlfriend when he was drunk and they were arguing, and one in five young people believing there were times when women bore some responsibility for sexual assault.

It was clear that more could be done earlier to stop what should never get the chance to start, and a new focus on the seeds of violence was needed.

“Working with DSS was really different in that we are talking years and years of conditioning that we had to undo. So, you can’t reverse that in one go,” Ms Aventi said.

“There were lots of barriers, it was clear we had to take steps and little nudges, but that’s the nature of behaviour change.”

Phase one of the ad campaign focused on recognising the problem of violence against women began with disrespect. It involved tackling the playing down of boys’ disrespectful behaviour and looked at the role parents had in this.

By using phrases such as “boys will be boys” and “don’t worry, he did it because he likes you”, which propagated violence in future generations, this forced people to relive or rethink about moments of disrespect. This made the problem more real and showed the impact of justifying or playing down certain behaviours seen in children.

Ms Aventi said it was the things people unwittingly said and did that had been normalised that allowed stereotypes and disrespect to grow – which in turn could spiral into violence if left unchecked.

Christina Aventi.

She said it was a long cause and effect chain that could be addressed only by primary prevention, and this required taking it step by step, undoing years of conditioning and then promoting more positive, respectful behaviours.

“Behaviour change happens in increments … it’s hard, so by getting it down to bite-sized pieces, you make it easier to make part of the change. And then you build on that,” Ms Aventi said.

After the launch of phase one, Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister at the time, said the campaign was “one of the most effective government advertising campaigns‘’ he had seen. Believing that DSS had “really nailed it”, having seen the ad scenes play out in real life, he described it as a real consciousness-shifting campaign “because it pulled people up with a jolt”.

Phase two of the fully integrated campaign in 2018 involved the need to reconcile that when faced with disrespect, you had a choice. This meant personalising this issue, reconciling your own role and that by choosing to excuse or do nothing you were helping to teach disrespect and increase the potential for future violence against women.

Compared with working on the fast-moving consumer goods or entertainment sectors, Ms Aventi said you did feel the weight of responsibility to get it right with work such as Stop it at the Start.

“Social marketing is a different kind of satisfying, but I’d say it is a beautiful burden that the team feels. That doesn’t take away from the other work we do, though. Any form of marketing – social or commercial – has a certain pressure. You don’t want to be polluting screens any more than they are,” she said.

Phase three of the campaign, which launched this year, looked at how to respond, with the barrier being intervening in an instance of disrespect rather than staying silent. The powerful ads showed parents weighing in on certain behaviours – such as interjecting when a child was throwing a ball at a girl, as doing it “because he probably liked her” did not justify it.

The ads tackled the perceived social risk about overreacting and aimed to give people the confidence to act and the power to unmute themselves.

“We demonstrated cost versus benefit via highlighting silence as the cost, feeling weightier than speaking up. In so doing, the levity that comes with having a conversation implies it is the better way forward,” Ms Aventi said.

Five years into the campaign and with phase four planned for next year, Ms Aventi said BMF was a firm believer in long-term ideas, despite it being hard at times to wait to see the results.

With so much evidence from Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science and the Institute of Public Affairs based on effectiveness case studies that proved the power of long ideas, she said some of the most iconic brands and businesses were founded on long ideas.

“Long ideas should become a part of the soul of the brand, so in some ways they should be infinite. But it doesn’t mean they stand still. They help build memory capital, trust – they are great shortcuts to meaning so I like long, long ideas,” she said.

As with any primary prevention campaign, it takes time to see change. While a reduction in the rate of violence cannot be seen immediately, evaluation research by DSS indicates the Stop it at the Start campaign has already had an impact.

Research across all three ­phases of the campaign found 67 per cent of influencers recalled the campaign, with 65 per cent of those people taking action as a result, such as having a conversation with a young person about respectful relationships, reconsidering the way they behaved towards others and changing the way they behaved towards others.

At a population level, this means 44 per cent of all influencers took an action as a result of the campaign.

Ms Aventi, who said it was galvanising knowing what you were working towards on campaigns such as this, added that the best part of the journey with DSS and research house Kantar Public had to be the “deep collaboration, not lip service collaboration”.

“Even though I find collaboration just a bit of a vacuous, overused word, DSS make it mean something again,” she said.

“The idea and scenarios are real­ly nuanced, the issue is thorny, and it really does take a village to craft this. The impact it is having is reward for the effort and craft.

“It’s also really sobering and gutting seeing the stats for end stage violence. The work is never done so it’s important we remind each other of the role this particular type of influencer-based comms is playing – long term, generational change.”