The Fifth Guy

One of the most famous campaigns in advertising history is the so-called “Crying Indian,” created by the Ad Council and Keep America Beautiful to mark Earth Day in 1971. The PSA ran for years and receives a lot of credit for increasing awareness of our deteriorating environment.

The PSA contains memorable visuals and an intense musical score. Leaving aside the cultural imagery that would be inappropriate today, viewers of that era found it to be emotionally compelling spot. But did the ad change behavior? On that point, the evidence is murky.

Sara Isaac from Marketing for Change discusses how this campaign might have gone wrong if the goal was, indeed, to change behavior.  The main character (who was not Native American, but instead a Sicilian dude from Louisiana…but we digress…) weeps as he walks through a countryside befouled by litter. The problem is the ad normalizes littering by showing how prevalent it is.

Isaac argues that a good social change campaign should align descriptive norms (what people actually do) with injunctive norms (what people should do).  In this famous campaign, those two norms are misaligned.

A better example that Isaac offers is her firm’s long-running “Fifth Guy” campaign to encourage hand washing. 

It aligns both of these norms and does so in a way that isn’t a lecture.  It assumes that the viewer is one of the 4 in 5 people who DO wash their hands after using the restroom, and invites us to poke fun at the proverbial “fifth guy” – that backwoods slob who doesn’t.  And it is clear that “fifth guy” is:  A) an exception, and B) not us.

 Isaac’s piece is a nice primer on one way that social nudges can work (or fail) in communication.