If you want a crude sketch of the biggest corporate players in a given year of TV, look no further than the Emmy Award for best commercial. Twenty-five years of winners form an ensemble cast of petty bourgeois preoccupations: Nike, Chrysler, Bud Light. This year\u2019s nominees included a commercial for Meta (the artist formerly known as Facebook<\/a>), one for Chevy (repping the still-muscular auto spend), two for Apple (a perennial contender), and two for the prevention of school shootings\u2014one of which won the Emmy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Gun-violence-prevention ads face a tougher challenge, as evidenced by their name\u2014an ungainly hyphenate designed to elide controversy. The phrase\u00a0gun control<\/i>\u00a0is polarizing<\/a>\u00a0and in certain ways moot. Nearly 400 million firearms already circulate through labyrinthine state and local systems. They trade hands with mixed transparency, flowing from established retailers such as Dick\u2019s Sporting Goods to gun-show booths to secondary sales and a fathomless black market. Advocates and lawmakers can attack the problem of gun violence from dozens of angles, but PSAs, which find success by seeding simple, powerful messages, are often seen as too blunt an instrument to communicate policy proposals.<\/p>\n And whereas most public-health campaigns target the end user, potential shooters are unlikely to be persuaded by such messages. Violence-prevention ads must instead make a more indirect appeal, conscripting community members to help stop shootings before they happen. How?\u00a0Opinions differ<\/a>. There is no single or obvious call to action that would ease what amounts to a systemic crisis. All of these factors add up to a heavy burden for a format that wasn\u2019t designed to induce social change. Many grassroots groups know this, but they\u2019re nonetheless emboldened by past campaigns that did alleviate social ills. And some are experimenting with new techniques and more pointed strategies, taking cues from one influential mission in particular: the fight to end smoking.<\/p>\n Cigarettes posed the ultimate public-health dilemma for much of the 20th century. Not only were cigarettes addictive, affordable, and ubiquitous, but smoking was also a personal choice that, to many, verged on a political right. Tobacco cultivation predates the existence of the United States, and cigarette manufacturers seized on that sense of heritage, gesturing toward a consistent, alluring myth: that smoking was innately American. \u201cMarlboro Man, freedom, patriotism \u2026 there\u2019s all this Americana imagery around smoking going back a hundred years,\u201d Tim Nudd, the editor in chief of the Clio Awards (essentially the Golden Globes of advertising), told me.<\/p>\n In its search for new users, Big Tobacco embarked on\u00a0a campaign of media carpet-bombing<\/a>, which it funded with a massive marketing war chest. (Mad Men<\/i>\u2019s most plausible moment might be when an ad-agency executive warns that a tobacco client accounts for 71 percent of his firm\u2019s business.) Thanks to its deep pockets and canny maneuvering, the industry survived decades of research on the adverse effects of smoking, not to mention the death of millions. Plus, smoking was seen as cool\u2014part of an aesthetic that Big Tobacco didn\u2019t invent but diligently copied.<\/p>\n The gun lobby isn\u2019t so different, according to Michael Siegel, a public-health professor at Tufts University. \u201cThirty years ago, the tobacco industry was like the NRA,\u201d he told me. Cigarette makers had a strong grip on Congress and a history of fending off critics with the same kind of hollow, nationalist copy heard in its commercials. Decreasing Americans\u2019 dependence on cigarettes demanded a widespread attitude adjustment that lawmaking alone couldn\u2019t deliver\u2014a belief that smoking wasn\u2019t just dangerous but societally toxic.<\/p>\n The NRA and its political allies have maintained a similar legislative impasse, though one aided by gun ownership\u2019s status as a constitutionally protected right, not just a culturally imagined one.\u00a0Decades of NRA doctrine<\/a>\u00a0have also helped redraw social lines, gerrymandering new boundaries between people\u00a0whose core values<\/a>\u00a0might not otherwise be in conflict. To break new ground, gun-violence-prevention advocates want to reframe the story of guns in America by lifting a page from the anti-smoking playbook.<\/p>\n In 1998, the four largest cigarette manufacturers signed the Master Settlement Agreement, which was like Big Tobacco\u2019s Treaty of Versailles. It required them to amend their marketing practices and make annual payments to the states to compensate for the medical costs incurred by smoking-related illnesses. Those concessions hobbled profitability\u2014up to a point. But tobacco\u2019s steep cultural decline can be attributed, in part, to a specific provision that allocated millions of dollars to a national PSA campaign aimed at dissuading new smokers. \u201cThe tobacco industry was so successful in getting these myths out there, these misconceptions, that the way we defeated them was by using advertising to counter their messages,\u201d Siegel said. In other words, anti-smoking groups outmarketed Big Tobacco with its own money.<\/p>\n Truth Initiative, the nonprofit that emerged from the settlement, directed this campaign. Its ads blended stunts, activism, and media to provocative effect, such as\u00a0when it dumped<\/a>\u00a01,200 body bags on the doorstep of the tobacco company Philip Morris, or\u00a0compared<\/a>\u00a0the contents of cigarettes to dog poop. These visceral PSAs helped bend public perception after decades of ineffectual reports from the Surgeon General\u2019s office, and they coincided with statewide adoptions of stringent indoor smoking bans. (Truth\u2019s strategy evolved from a pilot program launched in Florida in 1998; four years later, Floridians overwhelmingly voted for a constitutional amendment to prohibit smoking in all enclosed indoor workplaces, end-running policy makers who had failed to get it done in the legislature.)<\/p>\n Crucially, Truth adhered to a strict perspective: Smokers weren\u2019t the problem; cigarette makers were. The same lesson can be applied to the current slate of gun-violence-prevention PSAs. Nicole Hockley, who co-founded Sandy Hook Promise after losing her son Dylan in the 2012 massacre, described the need to create a \u201csafe space\u201d for gun owners to engage in conversation. \u201cThe moment you mention guns, people assume a side,\u201d she told me. \u201cYou\u2019re either for or against. And that gives a responsible gun owner no place to move.\u201d<\/p>\n Historically, piecemeal public-service ads have trod cautiously so as not to alienate a core constituency\u2014gun owners themselves, some 30 percent of Americans. They\u2019ve employed inconsistent strategies, sometimes urging gun owners to \u201clock it up,\u201d other times decrying feeble government regulation. Mixed messages threaten to undercut the impact of these PSAs, and soft targets can make for mealymouthed calls to action. Thoughtful, measured arguments aren\u2019t always the right fit for this medium, which usually requires a villain, like a Big Tobacco. \u201cFor us, that starts and stops with the NRA,\u201d Sam Shepherd, the global executive creative director of Leo Burnett, told me.<\/p>\n Shepherd and his team produced the first of this year\u2019s Emmy-nominated PSAs in partnership with Change the Ref, a nonprofit founded by Manuel and Patricia Oliver, who lost their son, Joaquin, in the Parkland shooting. Together they pulled a stunt straight out of the Truth campaign, inviting former NRA President David Keene to deliver an\u00a0address to 3,044 empty chairs<\/a>. Keene thought he was rehearsing the commencement speech he would give that week at a Las Vegas high school; in reality, each chair represented a would-be graduate of the nationwide class of 2021 who had died from gun violence.<\/p>\n Did it work? The big question of these ads\u2019 effectiveness, and how to measure it, remains. Though nonprofits and their agency partners have adopted tactics from the anti-smoking era, they still haven\u2019t settled on an ironclad strategy. Even an emotionally powerful commercial like \u201cThe Lost Class\u201d has its flaws. As the public face of firearms, the NRA makes for a compelling enemy, but those who would delight in seeing a man like Keene humiliated probably don\u2019t need a PSA to turn them against the group. And the commercial ends by inviting people to sign a petition for universal background checks\u2014the same type of legislation, it reminds us, that Keene and others have raised millions to undermine. If \u201cThe Lost Class\u201d is meant to catalyze some new behavior among ordinary viewers, it\u2019s unclear how.<\/p>\n Shepherd explained that the audience for \u201cThe Lost Class\u201d and the next wave of gun-violence-prevention PSAs isn\u2019t just individual citizens but also companies, suggesting that their participation would rescue the issue from years of partisan wheel-spinning. \u201cGetting a major brand involved will just help break it out of the two camps, the bubbles,\u201d he said. Viewed through that lens, it\u2019s perhaps no coincidence that grassroots groups have converged on the issue of gun violence in schools.\u00a0Focusing on schools<\/a>, as opposed to other public spaces, could make for an easier sell to corporations that might pantomime progressive values, but generally avoid substantive politics. Students, after all, are political innocents\u2014they live and die at the mercy of a system they didn\u2019t vote for. More cynically, they represent future consumers. The hope of some activists is that companies could embrace that responsibility if the right executives see the right PSAs.<\/p>\n Running commercials to win over Big Business has a wag-the-dog quality, but in the absence of federal support, these groups must rely on the benevolence of the private sector. Money is everything in advertising. Messaging, provocation, and creative ingenuity are simply ways to stretch a given budget. As scrappy and rebellious as anti-smoking PSAs in the early aughts might\u2019ve seemed, they were largely funded and coordinated at the federal level. The CDC\u2019s Office of Smoking and Health shared research with state health departments and furnished them with ready-made ads, free airtime, and technical assistance.<\/p>\n Siegel, who worked there at the time, can\u2019t fathom why a federal office for gun-violence prevention doesn\u2019t exist. \u201cIt\u2019s insane,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have an agency to deal with diabetes. We have an agency to deal with hypertension. We have an agency to deal with tobacco, alcohol, injuries \u2026 for God\u2019s sake, we have a tuberculosis office at CDC.\u201d In 2019, 526 Americans died of TB. Nearly 40,000 died from gunfire. That same year, after a 25-year hiatus, Congress appropriated $25 million for firearm-injury-prevention research, split between the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. The money is a promising start, but it falls well short of anti-smoking budgets.<\/p>\n Truth Initiative, which continues to fight against tobacco\u2019s legacy\u2014lending muscle to campaigns against things like vaping and cigarettes in PG-13 movies\u2014had more than $130 million in cash on hand last year. Neither Change the Ref nor Sandy Hook Promise have anywhere near that amount. Nor do they benefit from the extensive tracking and data collection that attend federal programs. \u201cMeasurement of effectiveness is incredibly difficult with gun-violence prevention,\u201d Nudd told me.<\/p>\n Whom should advocates try to reach, and what should they get them to do? Most commercial advertising begins with a brief outlining these exact parameters, based on years or even decades of market research. By comparison, gun-violence-prevention organizers operate in the dark. \u201cThe more data that we have, the more pointed we can be with solutions,\u201d Hockley said. She noted that 80 percent of school shooters signal their intent, or tell at least one person, but such stats are not widely taught\u2014so they became the foundation of a grassroots movement.<\/p>\n Sandy Hook Promise is behind this year\u2019s Emmy-winning commercial \u201cTeenage Dream,\u201d which features a devastating\u00a0rendition of the Katy Perry song<\/a>\u00a0by survivors of school shootings. They sing it hesitantly, with a sparse piano accompaniment, giving the adolescent lyrics a haunting subtext. After a short title appears\u2014\u201cThe teenage dream is not what it used to be\u201d\u2014we revisit each survivor to learn the nightmarish details of their experience. The video concludes with the nonprofit\u2019s long-running message to \u201cknow the signs.\u201d \u201cThat is a very actionable PSA,\u201d Nudd said. \u201cThat can and does, I think, change people\u2019s behavior.\u201d A CDC-led campaign could validate its strategy, or unearth new tactics altogether. But the Biden administration would first have to acknowledge our national epidemic. For advocates like Hockley and the Olivers, that means appointing a gun czar,\u00a0which the president has yet to do<\/a>.<\/p>\n The path forward hinges on a semantic distinction: whether firearm injuries are a matter of public health, not just public policy. I asked Siegel why gun violence\u2014which has little in common with cancer, HIV, and other diseases\u2014should be considered a health concern. \u201cWhat makes something a public-health crisis is the public\u2019s decision that it\u2019s not acceptable,\u201d he said. In 2020, gunshots overtook car crashes to become the leading cause of death among Americans ages 19 and under. Sixty-one mass shootings happened last month alone. We don\u2019t need PSAs to tell us that we\u2019re sick. But even the mildest reminds us there are better ways to live.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Prepare for an onslaught of anti-gun advertising. When you see these PSAs, call the station and protest these lobbying efforts. Write the station and ask that they put your letter in their files for the FCC.<\/em> I like how they’re trying to make a comparison to tobacco advertising despite the fact that most people will never see an ad from a gun company.<\/em><\/p>\n Ask yourself: When was the last time you saw a gun ad in a place that wasn’t specifically about guns (like an FFL or NRA magazine)? <\/em> In reading all those old magazines, one thing that was super obvious was how cigarette ads were EVERYWHERE, probably like 5-6 ads per TIME or Newsweek from the 1960s-1990s. This at least partially explains the long time blame on the gun manufactures who \u201ccare more about profits than children\u2019s lives.\u201d The slogan writers know they need a villain and they have been trying out the NRA and the manufactures.<\/em><\/p>\n For some reason criminals as villains are not acceptable. Is it because criminal are their natural ally in the fight against private gun ownership? If the criminals did not exist there would not be a publicly defendable need to restrict gun ownership.<\/em>\u2014Joe Huffman<\/p>\n That’s one of the funniest Atlantic screeds I’ve read in quite a while. Let’s just equate guns and cigarettes. After all, what worked on one will have to work on the other, right?<\/em><\/p>\n Cigarettes were widely advertised on TV for a very long time. It can be argued that some of the greats of classic television would not have happened but for the sponsorship of Big Tobacco. Where does Big Firearm advertise? Television? Nope. Gun magazines.<\/em><\/p>\n There may be a few “television commercials” which run on that which goes by the name of television these days, but it’s exclusively the domain of those specialist TV networks that are purely outdoorsmen-oriented. You’re never gonna see an ad for Daniel Defense during a sitcom, or Midway during the evening news, or Brownells during a day-time gameshow. Big Firearm video advertizing is low-budget, if it has a budget at all. At most, it’s about spondoring gun-centric YouTubers with a budget orders of magnitude less than what sponsored the Marlboro Hour during the hay day of black-and-white TV.<\/em><\/p>\n And the thing that they propose using to bring the Big Firearm down that would parallel what humbled Big Tobacco? Truth? How do they propose to forge that into existence? Big Tobacco saw the writing on the wall, that their product was on its way out, and their instinct was to save themselves long enough to get out with their fortunes intact. There’s absolutely zero motivation for any firearm-maker or firearm-retailer to sit down and talk over such proposals. We see firearm companies reading the writing on the wall in one jurisdiction and pulling the plug on thousands of jobs there to break camp and move their entire operation to another jurisdiction that’s friendlier. Or even, preferring to go bankrupt than capitulate.<\/em><\/p>\n Those few victories the hoplophobe caucus can point to, Walmart now only sells shotguns and shotgun ammo\u2026 maybe. Dicks got out of firearm retail altogether. Those are non-events to the rest of the industry. And it’s not like Dicks or Walmart advertized guns on TV anyway. At most, they were a small fraction of their weekly sales circular. Who’s gonna pay these ad agencies to make these anti-gun Public Disservice Announcements? No one!<\/em><\/p>\n There’s literally no there there!<\/em><\/p>\n But I absolutely encourage the anti-gun crowd to continue pursuing these feckless and vapid lines of enquiry. After all, as long as they’re doing that, they’re not doing something that might actually injure the gun industry. Idle hands are Chuck Schumer’s playground.\u00a0 —<\/em>u\/GunzAndCamo<\/p>\n And whereas most public-health campaigns target the end user, potential shooters are unlikely to be persuaded by such messages. Violence-prevention ads must instead make a more indirect appeal, conscripting community members to help stop shootings before they happen. How? Opinions differ. There is no single or obvious call to action that would ease what amounts to a systemic crisis.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There’s the crux there. Idiocy at it’s finest. What’s a call to action when you don’t know what the action should be? It’s whipping up a frenzied mob to scream, “SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING!” The best part has been that they can hold the mob together and direct it’s support without ever having any intention of solving ANY problems. —<\/em>u\/Vylnce An friend terms posts like this \u00fcb\u00ebrp\u00f6sts\u2122 (in other words: It’s looong) I’ll append commentary and observations from around the net. Observation O’ The Day It\u2019s a look into the smartest minds of the enemy. Joe Huffman The Ad Industry\u2019s Plan to Fix America\u2019s Gun Crisis If you want a crude sketch of the biggest … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,11,9,89,8,29,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment-o-the-day","category-crap-for-brains","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-observation-o-the-day","category-rkba","category-safety","category-self-defense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87701"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87709,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87701\/revisions\/87709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"PSAs](\"https:\/\/img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net\/tenant\/amp\/entityid\/AA13ZTzI.img?w=768&h=432&m=6\" "\\"PSAs")
\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n
\nTom Gresham@Guntalk<\/p>\n
\n
\nRob Romano @2Aupdates<\/p>\n
\n
\nNot one of the ones I’ve bought has a gun ad, even back then.<\/em>
\nKostas Moros @MorosKostas<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\n\n
\n<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
PSAs Killed Cigarettes. Can They Help End Gun Violence?<\/span>\u00a9 Getty; The Atlantic<\/span><\/div>\n
This marks the second time in three years that an ad addressing gun violence has been awarded. That might strike you as dystopian, but it\u2019s actually a positive sign. Commercials, the most expensive and lumbering ad units, tend to reflect ideas that have already matured in the marketplace. If most ads exist to stoke desire for a product or indulgence, public-service advertising is a kind of counterprogramming, going back to government wartime messages<\/a>\u00a0exhorting Americans to conserve resources.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Public-health campaigns, in particular, face the uphill battle of directing people away from their usual patterns of consumption. Eat less meat, don\u2019t drink and drive, resist the urge to light up: These have always been hard sells, even putting aside their inherent opposition to industry profits.<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n