How public agencies use storytelling to increase policy adoption
I got my first break in journalism because of litter.
I was a young reporter in Tasmania writing about a farmer who was fed up with collecting other people's rubbish from along her fence line. I needed to say where her farm was, so I wrote that it sat one "can's drive" from the nearest town. Anyone who grew up in the country knew what that meant. You buy a beer in town, you open it as you pull out, and the farmer's front paddock is about where you finish it. (The drink-driving laws weren’t as strict back then.) The editor who was deciding whether to hire me loved the line, and I got the job.
What does that have to do with public sector video production? Fair question. It came to mind because the best public sector campaign I can think of, also begins with a beer can flying out the window of a ute. Or, since this was actually in Texas, a pickup.
Texas had a rubbish problem, and his name was Bubba
In the mid-1980s Texas was spending about $20 million a year picking up roadside litter, and the pile was reported to be growing 17% a year. When researchers went looking for the culprit they found a man aged 18 to 34 who drove a pickup. The ad people nicknamed him Bubba.
The state had asked nicely, reminded him of his civic duty and waved fines at him. Bubba did not see himself as the sort of man who kept things beautiful.
So Tim McClure, at an Austin agency called GSD&M, stopped asking and came up with a simple slogan, “Don’t Mess with Texas”. The line had two meanings. "Mess" meant litter, but "don't mess with" is also what a Texan says to anyone looking for trouble. In December 1985, bumper stickers carrying those four words and a Texas flag began turning up at truck stops and fast food joints, with no government logo near them. Bubba put one on his pickup before he knew what it was for.
He found out on New Year's Day 1986. During the Cotton Bowl Classic – a big American college football game – legendary Texan blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan stood in front of a 60-foot Texas flag and played "The Eyes of Texas" while a narrator mentioned, briefly, that litter cost the state $20 million a year, and that messing with Texas was an insult to the Lone Star State as well as a crime. Then Vaughan delivered the line. Viewers rang their TV stations asking to see the "music video" again.
When the ad was previewed at the transport department, Texas Monthly reports, the executive director said he didn't think he liked it. "Good!" came the reply. "You're not the target audience!"
TIME reported 29% less litter within the first year. By 1990 the reported drop was 72%. The ads had plenty of help from clean-up crews and volunteers, but look at what they did. They found a man who didn't take orders and told him a real Texan wouldn't stand for anyone trashing his state. Bubba went from litterbug to model citizen.
People will do almost anything for status, except be told what to do
The writer Will Storr has spent two books, The Status Game and A Story Is a Deal, arguing that two social motivations sit underneath most of what we do: connection, which is belonging to a group, and status, which is how we see ourselves inside the group. Each of us carries around a story with ourselves as the hero, and we take on new behaviour when it suits the character.
That explains why so much government communication bounces off the intended audience. A message that says "you're doing the wrong thing, here are the facts, please stop" asks the audience to accept a small demotion in front of their mates. The psychologist Jack Brehm called this reactance in 1966: threaten someone's sense of freedom and they may dig in just to get it back.
So the useful question in policy communication has two parts. Who does my audience think they are? And how does my policy make that person look good to their peers?
The contractor who was told to fix his English
In his 1999 National Day Rally speech, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong took aim at the country's favourite sitcom contractor, the gloriously Singlish Phua Chu Kang (PCK), and said he'd asked the broadcaster to send the character to English classes. The Speak Good English Movement began the following year.
Then SARS arrived. In 2003 the same character, featuring yellow boots, perm, mole and all, fronted the SAR-vivor Rap, a joint project of Channel 5, the Ministry of Health and the Health Promotion Board. It delivered hygiene advice in the very language officialdom had been trying to tidy up. In 2021 he was back with "Get Your Shot, Steady Pom Pi Pi", aimed at the over-45s who were hesitating about COVID vaccines. The ministry counted more than 1.7 million views on YouTube and 1.8 million on Facebook.
Nobody can say how many jabs a music video delivered. The decision is the clever party. A health advisory in perfect English tells the heartlander that someone above him is issuing instructions. PCK saying the same thing tells him that people like us are smart enough to look after ourselves.
Nobody could take off his jacket until the Prime Minister did
In 2005 Japan's government wanted offices to set the air conditioning at 28°C over summer. The obstacle was the salaryman's suit and tie. Nobody wanted to be the first man on the floor in short sleeves, whatever a pamphlet about carbon said.
Environment Minister Yuriko Koike saw that this was a problem of standing, so Cool Biz started at the top. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi appeared without a tie, and at one point in an Okinawan kariyushi shirt. The head of Keidanren, the big business federation, urged companies to join in. Once the most senior men in the country had loosened their collars, keeping yours buttoned stopped being the safe choice. The ministry estimated the first summer saved about 460,000 tonnes of CO₂, roughly what a million households emit in a month.
The entire message was: the boss says it's fine.
Let the audience make your argument for you
Bangkok, 2012. The Thai Health Promotion Foundation and Ogilvy sent children up to adults who were smoking in the street. Each child held a cigarette and asked for a light. According to the campaign's case study, every adult refused, and most threw in a lecture about what smoking does to you. The child then handed over a note: "You worry about me, but why not about yourself?" Underneath was the number of the 1600 quitline.
The campaign reported a budget of US$5,000 and no paid media. The film passed five million YouTube views in ten days, and a policy brief hosted by the WHO puts the rise in calls to the quitline at 40%. The smokers made the case against smoking themselves, while playing a role every adult is proud of: the grown-up who looks out for a kid.
Now, about your 11 key messages
Status games get played inside agencies too.
In 1990 a Stanford PhD student, Elizabeth Newton, asked people to tap out well-known songs on a table while a listener guessed the tune. The tappers predicted listeners would get it half the time. Out of 120 songs, listeners got three. The tapper hears the melody in her head. The listener hears knocking.
This is the curse of knowledge, and anyone who has lived inside a policy for two years has a bad case of it. Add the internal pecking order, where every division that contributed wants its paragraph in the script as proof its work mattered, and you arrive at the 90-second government video with 11 key messages. Texas managed with four words. (We've looked at how the approval chain makes this worse in our piece on public sector animation.)
What this means for public sector video production
Before anyone writes a script, a few plain questions. Who, exactly, is doing the thing you want changed, and who do they think they are? Does doing what you ask make them look better or worse in front of the people whose opinion they care about? Who would they happily hear this from, given it's unlikely to be you? And if you could say only one thing, what would it be? Then say only that.
Get those answers right and the script usually gets shorter on its own. Bubba never needed the facts about litter. He needed a version of the message where he got to be the hero.
If you want to know whether you really understand your audience, find out what they measure distance in. For that farmer's neighbours, it was a can.
Click2View provides video production and animation for government agencies and statutory boards across Asia. If your audience keeps hearing instructions instead of an invitation, talk to us.
