99 Red…Ooops, Black… Balloons

Here’s a nifty TV commercial and/or PSA (not sure which) about global warming. A few unfortunate words choices hold it back from achieving greatness.The black balloons make it come close. They provide a vivid and compelling illustration of how our various little energy uses add up. It’s terrific. “Save energy, and you’ll also save money,” the narrator intones. Nice. Like that. The closing tagline is: “You have the power to make a difference.” Right on.But it’s just a flat out mistake to use the term “climate change” in a piece like this when you could use “global warming” instead. It’s well established that everyday citizens respond to these terms quite differently. I know the chart below is hard to read — click to get to the full report — but it reports the results of polling around various terms, and basically finds that everday citizens report 25% more concern when asked about “global warming” than “climate change.” That’s a big difference!
Source: The Environmental Deficit: Survey on American Attitudes on the Environment, Global Strategy Group, 2004 Finally, there’s not a single line in there about why you should care about either climate change OR global warming. Plenty of people out there in TV land need at least a little reminder of that for the rest of the PSA to make sense.

So here’s what I propose:

• First, replace the term “climate change” with “global warming” in every instance
• Second, replace the bland-sounding term “greenhouse gas” with the more attention-grabbing term “pollution that causes global warming”
• Finally, kick off the piece with a statement like “If we don’t stop global warming, future generations won’t be as safe as we are today.”

THEN the script will be as powerful as the visuals.

Thanks to Robert at watercrunch for forwarding me the tip!

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