No red lines for cancer campaigns: Shock factor at work in charities’ ads

THERE’S no shortage of shock — or to be polite — emotive charity advertisements over which ethics pundits, the taste police, and media students can keep themselves busy. 

Examples drawn from around the Western world include a cockroach emerging from a baby’s mouth (child poverty), a toddler injecting himself with heroin (a children’s charity), and a naked man apparently copulating with a giant crab (AIDS). Ireland’s latest contribution to the shockvertising debate comes from the Irish Cancer Society (ICS), whose 2017 two-part awareness and fundraising campaign advertisement features a young woman saying firstly: “I want to get cancer.” In the second part, she’s revealed as a scientist telling readers and viewers: “I want to get cancer… before it gets you.”

It’s clever and powerful, and it’s no surprise that the campaign has been two years in the making. Charity awareness advertising must do precisely what it says on the tin, which means the line between sensitivity and impact is almost always smudged, if not completely rubbed out, and that some readers and television viewers will find the language and the images disturbing. One test for justifying the shock message is financial. Many of these campaigns do raise much-needed funds. Another looks at the extent to which it succeeds in attracting attention and raising awareness. On this measure, the ICS campaign succeeds.

Even in an exceptionally generous country such as this, times are challenging for charities. People’s lives are busier — with pleasure, diverse media, work or worry — which means the organisations promoting excellent causes at a time when both the state and citizens are short of resources must press every possible button to capture the fleeting attention of readers and viewers.

The consequent concern for charities is competition: a euro or two given to one good charity could well mean, in today’s post-crash world, a euro or two less for an equally worthy cause.

It’s a zero-sum test that fuels the drive to shock, and it more than justifies campaigns designed, as the ICS project is, to not only raise awareness of cancer but also to quell some of the fear it generates. Ireland has more than 150,000 cancer survivors, representing a survival rate twice that recorded in the 1970s. That’s a good news story, even if it does take a shocking advertisement to tell it.