Yesterday morning I heard an ad for what you could call ‘Meningitis Awareness’ on local radio. Later in the day, waiting at traffic lights while ‘taxiing’ kids home from highland dancing, I noticed a poster for the same thing in a shop window. While it was a good example of how different channels can build a campaign when targeted at an interested customer, I was staggered by a major omission in the execution. Both ads talk about the dangers of meningitis, and give a phone number (and I think possibly a url) where you can get information on how to recognise the symptoms. As a parent I’m an interested customer of long standing. But I don’t want to know where I can get information to recognise the symptoms. I want to know what they are. Now, please! And I’d like them regularly repeated, because it’s easy to forget this kind of stuff. As a soccer coach for one of my kids’ teams I’m also a first-aider, and I have to read my training manual every couple of weeks just to keep up with basics like recognising the difference between shock and concussion.
I find extraordinary the lengths that advertisers expect their customers to go on their behalf. For instance, what’s the point of giving out phone numbers on local radio? The reason people listen to the radio is so they can do something else at the same time: that doesn’t usually include sitting with pen poised and notebook at the ready, to write down any ads of vague interest.
Equally fundamental is the fact that people mainly act when they need to. For instance, if spare tyres weren’t built in to cars as standard, how many motorists do you think would take the trouble to carry them around? Parents are busy enough, never mind expecting them to phone up about obscure diseases their kids might get.
Then there’s the switch-off factor. Once you know an ad’s of no use to you, you process it out. It goes under the radar. Yet if these ads actually described the common symptoms of meningitis, I can tell you I for one would be paying attention – and listening out for the next one to rehearse my knowledge.
I’ve been pondering why they don’t want to do something so obvious as describe the symptoms. It must be a deliberate decision. Maybe to avoid thousands of panic-striken parents flooding local surgeries and A&Es with false alarms? Does that mean you have to wait until your child has something which you think might be meningitis (but you don’t really know, because they won’t tell you)… then try to remember the phone number or the url or even that there actually is somewhere you can officially check it out? This campaign seems like a big waste of money to me. Please send me a sticker I can put in the bathroom cabinet.
