Can Advertising Motivate Imbeciles?

I got a message today from a friend in the ad business. Peter Levitan is a successful, well-respected, ad guy who has held some very high positions in global ad agencies. He now works on his own as an agency consultant.

The message said this, “Bob, can you use your power to get one fucking smart agency to do a ‘get vaccinated’ campaign?” For the purpose of this essay, let’s pretend for a minute that he's right and I actually have some power.

We know that ad agencies can make a name for themselves creatively by taking on soft issues like health, and charity, and other fashionable civic virtues. There isn’t a creative team anywhere that doesn’t dream of a Cannes Lions for doing a public service campaign. A 'get vaccinated' campaign would be the easiest A in the world. Ya know, a few..."Our Economy Needs A Shot In The Arm" and you'll be carrying home gold. Okay, maybe bronze.

Bad copy aside, the important question here is not whether this kind of campaign would be good for the agency, the question is, will it work?

To answer this question I’m going to go back 20 years. At the time I was a reasonably successful ad guy who was becoming disillusioned with what I was seeing in the ad industry. To express my disenchantment, I started writing about the business.

My first long-form writing effort was a promotional piece I wrote for my agency. It was a small book called “Performance Based Advertising.” This was before ‘performance based advertising’ came to mean that unspeakable crap that passes for advertising on the web. The book was written at the time to serve as a set of principles that (we hoped) would differentiate us from other agencies.

In describing one of our principles, I wrote this…?

“It’s easier for me to convince you to eat a Big Mac than it is to convince you that a Big Mac is a good thing to eat.”

The point was, contrary to most marketing "expertise," it is often easier and more fruitful for marketers to focus on changing behaviors than attitudes. The idea that you must first change attitudes in order to change behaviors is often both wrong and wasteful.

Attitudes are changed by arguments. Behaviors are change by incentives.

Now we come to COVID. There are tens of millions of people here in the US who have refused to get COVID shots, when all they have to do is walk into a drug store and ask for it. These people are imbeciles. Among the enormous damage and destruction they are indirectly causing is the hospitalization and deaths of many men, women, and children.

(Now let’s get the obligatory political correctness out of the way. There are some people who can’t get the shot for medical reasons, and there are some god-botherers who think their sky-buddy will be all pissed off if they cheat death -- these people are a different flavor of imbecile. Other than that, anyone who has access to the shot and is refusing to get it is a moron.)

Are there some hold-outs who can be convinced by advertising to get shots? I'm sure there are. Good advertising would convince some of these people to do the right thing, and that is certainly a worthwhile endeavor. But will it convince the bulk of anti-vaxers to join the real world? I doubt it. For the most part, their minds are made up. The great Jack Trout once wrote, “If your assignment is to change peoples' minds, don’t accept the assignment.”

These people have proven themselves to be immune to logic and reason. Attempting to change their attitudes is likely to be an enormous waste of time.

Instead, if we want to get these dimwits vaccinated we need to focus on changing their behavior. We need some strong incentives. Here's my dumb-guy solution -- don’t let them into football games, Nascar events, or porn sites without proof of vaccination. That ought to do the trick.

In the meantime, if you run an agency and want to win some awards and maybe convince some people to do the right thing, how about making my friend Peter happy and producing a great 'get vaccinated' campaign?

Bob Hoffman is author of the Amazon #1 selling book "Advertising For Skeptics " and creator of The Ad Contrarian Newsletter and blog.