In most home fires, smoke kills more peo­ple than actu­ally flames.  That’s a commonly-quoted fact. But sim­ply stat­ing that fact never com­pelled any­one to test their smoke detectors/fire alarms.

The fact comes off as more inter­est­ing than com­pelling. One tends to view it in much the same way one views the (rather dubi­ous) sta­tis­tic that 50% of drunk men who drown are found with their fly unzipped.

Here’s how to cause peo­ple to REALIZE the truth behind the smoke statistic:

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A cou­ple of things to keep in mind about this ad:

1) The sta­tis­tic was un-motivating because the men­tal image it cre­ated was hazy (pun intended).  Most peo­ple pic­ture con­scious indi­vid­u­als who, hav­ing been awak­ened from the smell/heat/sounds, are then over­come by the smoke some­how.  This leads the audi­ence to ques­tion the real­ity of the sta­tis­tic; you can almost hear them think­ing: “can that many peo­ple not drop down to the ground, put some cloth­ing over their face, and get the heck out of the home?”

2) The image of cough­ing on smoke-filled air isn’t nearly as pri­mal and scary as drown­ing. I’m not say­ing this makes sense, just that it’s an emo­tional real­ity for me and for most oth­ers that I’ve spo­ken with.

3) This ad bril­liantly dis­pels any con­fu­sion or vague images around how and why peo­ple are over­come and killed by smoke while replac­ing those vague images with a star­tlingly clear and appropriately-frightening image of drown­ing.

Mediocre copy­writ­ers string words together; great copy­writ­ers cre­ate and sequence men­tal images. That’s one of the pri­mary dif­fer­ences between telling the truth and caus­ing peo­ple to real­ize it.

Hat tip to AdF­reak for turn­ing me onto this ad

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Comments

  1. Tom Wanek on 10.10.2009

    Wow, it’s amaz­ing the per­sua­sive punch gained from select­ing a strong men­tal image that any­one can iden­tify with. It made me rush out and check the bat­ter­ies of MY smoke detectors.

    Solid analy­sis, Jeff.

  2. Tom Wanek on 10.10.2009

    Wow, it’s amaz­ing the per­sua­sive punch gained from select­ing a strong men­tal image that any­one can iden­tify with. It made me rush out and check the bat­ter­ies of MY smoke detectors.

    Solid analy­sis, Jeff.

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