Show, don’t tell

A picture is worth a thousand words. In today’s image-driven news cycle and mass media culture, this is truer than ever. Effective creative campaigns must be image-driven, too. In other words, show, don’t tell. And there are a lot of ways to do it.

Lead with story, not facts. Facts rarely speak for themselves. While the factual accuracy of your message is essential, facts should only serve as the supporting details for the story, not the hook that makes the story compelling.

If you want to convey the devastation of unemployment, don’t lead with statistics. Tell us a compelling story about one person. Then tell us there are ten million more like her out there.

A well-designed action explains itself, and ideally offers multiple ways into the issue. You want your audience to reach their own conclusion, rather than feeling like they are being told what to think.

Make it visual. A lot of important stuff is hard to talk about — it’s too big, far away, abstract, or complex. Props, visuals, and concrete language can help bring things down to human scale. Take economic inequality, for example. You can easily get lost in the finer points of the US tax code, but when billionaire Warren Buffet says that his secretary pays more taxes than he does, and that that’s wrong, it’s hard to argue with. To draw attention to the increasing disparity between CEO and worker pay, one group unveiled a tiny replica of the Washington Monument that was 419 times smaller than the actual one they were holding their press conference in front of.

Use powerful metaphors. With metaphor you can show something for what it is, rather than have to explain it. To find your compelling metaphor, look for something that embodies what you are trying to communicate. Recently, the immigration debate in the US has been usefully engaged via the metaphor of migratory birds (“Do migrating birds need passports too?”), neatly pointing up the absurdity of the situation, without focusing on any specific policy or piece of legislation.

Speak with actions. Instead of telling, act out what it is that you want to say. At protests, whenever there are lines of police protecting a bank, a metaphor is being enacted that reflects the reality of the situation: The state defends the wealthy from the rest of us. Sometimes it’s enough to just point that out — or you can ham it up (see: STORY: The Teddy Bear Catapult).

A well-designed action explains itself, and ideally offers multiple ways into the issue. You want your audience to reach their own conclusion, rather than feeling like they are being told what to think.

Preachy isn’t persuasive. Whether we’re telling a story, conjuring a scene, offering up a metaphor, leading by example, or letting our actions speak volumes, there are millions of ways to convey our message and values without launching into a political diatribe. Let’s do ourselves and our audience a favour: Show, don’t tell.

Originally published in Beautiful Trouble.