Breaking through organ donor inertia

Unsplash / Jesse Orrico

A common marketing challenge involves breaking through inertia.  Getting people to do things they know they should do, but don’t – either because of laziness, status quo bias, or various unconscious emotional barriers.

An area where this is especially relevant is organ donation.  A new ad in Canada and a new academic study offer two perspectives about how organ donation advocates can use audio to move people’s minds.

The academic research, led by a team at the University of Illinois, suggests ads featuring happy stories of organ recipients and their families were more persuasive than those with stories driven by sadness. This was especially true among those non-donors who exhibit high levels of mistrust toward the medical community. For those people, sad messages were often seen as transparently manipulative, which can backfire and actually make people less likely to act.

Another example is an ad whose content isn’t exactly happy or sad…but it is really clever, so maybe it does put a little smile on people’s faces.  The Toronto agency DonorNorth (whose name is just a coincidence – Donor was the last name of the man who founded the agency) created an audio ad called “The Donated Commercial.”  It is a :30 scrapped together from audio snippets “donated” from 48 other ads.

It immediately gets your attention. And it has been successful.  On Spotify, the ad’s clickthrough rate was 87 percent higher than average, and 79 percent of those who clicked through to the OrganTissueDonation.ca website became donors.