The powerful impact of 'shock and awe'
There’s no such thing as bad publicity. At least that’s how the saying goes. That phrase entered my mind while traveling recently on Toronto’s transit system. The subway car I was riding in featured a number of graphic, cartoon-type ads featuring young people with rather gruesome injuries.
One featured a young man with a bandaged arm, blood leaking through a stump where his hand used to be. Another smaller ad, further down the subway car, showed a severed ear with an iPod headphone still attached to it. Still another showed a teen with a steel rod protruding through his head. All were cartoon style.
They’re certainly attention-grabbing advertisements. But what’s more interesting is who placed them there, and why. They’re from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB), Ontario’s workers’ compensation board, and they’re designed to get young workers thinking about safety.
This isn’t the first time the WSIB has used “shock and awe” to get the message out to young workers. As reported in the Nov. 6, 2006, issue of Canadian HR Reporter the WSIB ran a series of graphic advertisements showing workers being killed. (You can view one of the ads from the campaign by going to www.hrreporter.com, clicking on “Advanced Search” and entering article #4775.)
But this new campaign is different, inviting young people to a website — www.youngworker.ca — where they can visit “Prevent-Itville” and win MP3 players, phones, Xbox 360 consoles and scholarships. The cleverly designed, fun-to-navigate website gives young workers examples of how workplace accidents can affect their lives. In a series of animations, it shows “Scott,” a worker with a bloody stump for a hand: getting handily beaten by his friend playing video games; being able to catch, but unable to throw, a baseball; having trouble driving a stick-shift car; and being unable to properly eat popcorn at a movie because of the gruesome injury he apparently suffered while slicing salami at work.
It’s as gross as it is effective. And, unfortunately, the campaign is desperately needed. According to the WSIB, 10 young workers were killed on the job in Ontario last year — a heart-wrenching number.
The WSIB should be lauded for pulling out all the stops, and being creative, in order to get young people thinking about workplace safety. HR professionals know better than anyone safety is often the farthest thing from their minds. They’re more concerned about learning the job, doing it properly and collecting a paycheque. It never occurs to the vast majority of young workers they can be seriously injured, or even killed, at work.
Which brings me back to my point about no publicity being bad publicity. The subway car I was on was also filled with a lot of high school-age students. And they were talking about the ads. Not in a serious way, of course. They were making fun of them and laughing about them. But they saw them, and the ads made enough of an impression to influence their conversation. Odds are at least one of them was intrigued enough to go home and look up the website. And that’s what this campaign is all about.
One featured a young man with a bandaged arm, blood leaking through a stump where his hand used to be. Another smaller ad, further down the subway car, showed a severed ear with an iPod headphone still attached to it. Still another showed a teen with a steel rod protruding through his head. All were cartoon style.
They’re certainly attention-grabbing advertisements. But what’s more interesting is who placed them there, and why. They’re from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB), Ontario’s workers’ compensation board, and they’re designed to get young workers thinking about safety.
This isn’t the first time the WSIB has used “shock and awe” to get the message out to young workers. As reported in the Nov. 6, 2006, issue of Canadian HR Reporter the WSIB ran a series of graphic advertisements showing workers being killed. (You can view one of the ads from the campaign by going to www.hrreporter.com, clicking on “Advanced Search” and entering article #4775.)
But this new campaign is different, inviting young people to a website — www.youngworker.ca — where they can visit “Prevent-Itville” and win MP3 players, phones, Xbox 360 consoles and scholarships. The cleverly designed, fun-to-navigate website gives young workers examples of how workplace accidents can affect their lives. In a series of animations, it shows “Scott,” a worker with a bloody stump for a hand: getting handily beaten by his friend playing video games; being able to catch, but unable to throw, a baseball; having trouble driving a stick-shift car; and being unable to properly eat popcorn at a movie because of the gruesome injury he apparently suffered while slicing salami at work.
It’s as gross as it is effective. And, unfortunately, the campaign is desperately needed. According to the WSIB, 10 young workers were killed on the job in Ontario last year — a heart-wrenching number.
The WSIB should be lauded for pulling out all the stops, and being creative, in order to get young people thinking about workplace safety. HR professionals know better than anyone safety is often the farthest thing from their minds. They’re more concerned about learning the job, doing it properly and collecting a paycheque. It never occurs to the vast majority of young workers they can be seriously injured, or even killed, at work.
Which brings me back to my point about no publicity being bad publicity. The subway car I was on was also filled with a lot of high school-age students. And they were talking about the ads. Not in a serious way, of course. They were making fun of them and laughing about them. But they saw them, and the ads made enough of an impression to influence their conversation. Odds are at least one of them was intrigued enough to go home and look up the website. And that’s what this campaign is all about.
