OK, I know they have a fetish with hanging banners from high things but if I were giving my hard earned pay to them I would be a bit peeved at this ‘boys and their toys’ activism. What exactly is happening here? Big balloon flies over what looks like desert with a sign on it. End. I am sure there must have been more to it than this. Are they flying over the Koch Brothers ‘secret’ meeting venue? Who know. From the road the airship looks tiny. Were they expecting the drivers to read what was written on the side? Or was this aimed at the Koch Brothers? Surely they knew they were having a meeting already?

Not far from where I am sat there are a some excellent NGOs who could produce very interesting and informative videos with the money it took to make this (including the air ship). Me things INGOs have become self perpetuating bloated beasts with too much money for their own good and need to be rationalised.  Don’t give them your money, give it to small local NGOs in developing countries, they need it more.

It is rather unrelenting (though that might be more to do with it taking over 30 mins to buffer on my snail paced internet connection). Not sure what we are supposed to do after watching it…cry on our cars (or kiss my bike)? There is a list of suggested behavioural changes we can all make at the bottom of the page which all sound OK, though given the drama of the piece they seem rather dwarfed by the problem. Anyway, I now feel terribly guilty about the number of work flights I have to make in the next month which is an outcome I guess?

What I did follow was the build-up to the event, and the audio-visual and web based materials many INGOs were producing. The video below, commissioned by Greenpeace and made by Roman Rutten is a good example. It is also icily appropriate if you are in the UK at the moment as we are locked down by snow!

Despite Copenhagen being an activist extravaganza of unprecidented proportions, with vast amounts of money pumped into slide shows, videos and snazzy websites, did we come out with anything better for it? Impossible to say. You can’t do controlled experiments on these things.

That isn’t to say campaigning is a waste of time. But there must be lessons to be learnt. One surely is that campaigns, including those using of images, video and the web, no matter how cool and compelling they are, just aren’t as powerful as we like to think they are. And that leads to the second lesson, that when you need majorities to move those in power you have to present your arguments to appeal to them. So much of the material I saw in the build-up to Copenhagen was aimed at capturing the involvement of what I would call the ‘converted’. Not a bad place to start, but I am not sure how relevant the melting glaciers of the Himalayas or flooding villages of Bangladesh are to people in suburban England? So, why did I see more on that than what was going to happen at home?

If you want to show people a global perspective then you need to link it to their world. In development this is done by empathy. In human rights by appealing to a sense of natural justice. And in regard to climate change to people’s wallets. Cynical maybe, but if you can show how a changing environment is going to make people worse off then they may be moved to act. And feel more solidarity to those worse off who are already feeling the bite of changing weather patterns. Just a thought.

WITNESS remains one of the stand out organisations working with and empowering people to use video for social activism. It seems only yesterday, but is apparently two years, since they launched their excellent Hub.

Here, WITNESS staff and interns nominate the videos from 2009 that made the most impact with them. Included are ‘Choose a Different Ending‘, an excellent interactive YouTube video on knife crime in the UK allowing you to make choices on how the story unfolds and ends. I thought this had been featured here but I can’t find it. May be I just dreamt it?

Also featured is the superb ‘Gabura‘ by Oxfam UK that looks at the impact of climate change on a community in Bangladesh.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is running two competitions to raise awareness of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

The competitions, both photographic and video, are themed around ‘Changing Lives’. For contest rules click here. Submission deadline for both comps is 31 October 2009.

The 37 second ad consists of one scene that involves animated degradation and restoration of a topless African man in an arid landscape devoid of human habitation (either rural or urban). The man stands voiceless as Jeremy Irons (a well known British actor) provides a voice over on how climate change impacts most on the world’s poor. In the run up to the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen this December the ad is well timed.

The images move from the negative to positive as the man and surrounding country side are restored, with the voice over appealing to us that ‘together’ we can change things. Yet why does the man, even if a metaphor, not say anything? Why is Irons used rather than a voice from Africa? Is his ‘cool’ voice and celebrity recognition a good enough reason to go with him rather than, say, a celebrity from Africa? Why is the landscape devoid of the realities of everyday life in Africa? And where is the evidence of the agency of the people living in such circumstances?

Given the well established critique of universalised images of people from Africa, particularly in regard to famine, conflict and rights violations, this ad could be seen as ticking all the wrong boxes. But is that a fair evaluation?

Joanna from Oxfam Ireland comments;

‘The purpose of the campaign is to highlight the human face of climate change and the impact it is already having on people living in poverty…’

But does using this ‘everyman’ achieve this? Are we any closer to an understanding of the impact, and does it bridge the gap between the viewer and those facing this challenge? As Joanna goes on to point out, Oxfam provides an array of other materials, including video, which ‘give affected communities the opportunity to tell their own stories, in their own word.’ Should we thus read the ad more as ‘art‘ – in an iconic/metaphoric sense – than as providing ‘witness‘ to the problems? And if so, does this necessitate a different reading that ignores the same critique that photojournalism has undergone in recent decades?

Gateway ads will always present certain challenged – the need to simplify due to time/space in order to capture the attention of our audience. Only when we have their interest can we provide them with greater depth and detail. We have to acknowledge what the audience knows and what will connect with them (e.g. Jeremy Irons voice). Even so, the images in such ads, despite being backed-up with further info, cannot escape scrutiny. For visual reasons it makes some sense that the man is naked waste up, to emphasize the change that takes place to his body. But does this not also tap into colonial representations of the ‘African native’? Or does he represent a ‘metaphoric everyman‘? When does metaphor slip into stereotype? If we twist the ad and change location from Africa to Greece, California or Australia where bush fires are increasingly a problem partly due to drier climatic conditions would we use similar imanigary?

Having argued that there should be an increased use of artistic visuals and construted images in social activism I do not want to be overly critical of what Oxfam Ireland have attempted to do. That however does not mean that they managed to pull it off. I also don’t want to criticise without making alternative suggestions. I have already mentioned changing the voice over. Could we also not have had a scene more representative of the reality and specific  to the problem? Could we not have seen a village with farm land transformed? Wells and irrigation spring to life, crops prosper etc. Could we not have seen communities transformed, not only in Africa but in Bangladesh, India, China etc. OK, 37 seconds isn’t very long and I will not pretend that you can fit everything you want into such a short clip, but in a visual world full of over simplified and unrepresentative images these are questions we need to contiually ask ourselves.

Full page ad aimed at Japan's PM in his favourite comic book

Although over the last couple of years I have come across a small number of good campaigns using illustrations / cartoons, they are few and far between. An underused format? If you know of good examples please send my way.