HSE ads warning about the dangers of cocaine are patronising rather than informative, members of the target audience tell Fiona McCann
'The weekend's here, time for a bit of fun with your friends," a young man says. "So it's on to a pub and maybe a club. Then just when you're at your most relaxed, somebody offers you a line of coke. You think, fair enough . . ." His voice is young, maybe early twenties, his tone upbeat, as any young person approaching a weekend of fun would be.
"It's just a bit of a laugh," he says, before changing tack. "See if this is a bit of a laugh," as he proceeds to reel out stark statistics about the harm cocaine can do.
The voice is that of an actor employed on one of three radio ads launched by the Health Service Executive (HSE) to target cocaine users. The radio ads are just one part of a national push hitting bus shelters, billboards and computers. The cost of the campaign comes in at half a million euro. The question is, will it work?
Not according to Eoin Blaney (20), who falls into the 18-34 year old target audience. "If people are using cocaine, that isn't going to stop them," he says after listening to the radio ads.
In one, a female voice warns cocaine use can kill, an ad that Blaney finds particularly difficult to listen to, but not because of the arresting subject matter. "It comes across as really patronising," he says. "It's like your mum or your granny giving you a lecture about what's going to happen. The tone they're using isn't a great way of going about giving young people advice."
He's not the only one who feels the ads talk down to the people they are purportedly trying to reach. Laura Cremen (20) says she finds the concept condescending. "I think if you're really trying to do something like this, you need to try and be in your face and obvious about it, and not try to patronise people by saying 'Look! we're one of you! We're cool too, we go out and we get drunk' . . . It just doesn't sit right with me. To be honest, I'd prefer somebody to be straight with me than to think that I am not intelligent enough to understand a serious ad about a serious subject."
She is also irritated by what she sees as a jocular tone that attempts to relate to young people on a night out rather than giving them the information and allowing them to draw their own conclusions. "It's just quite patronising the way it approaches it," she says. "It says that young people won't listen if it's just the serious facts."
GER HANNA, SOCIAL marketing manager for health promotion in the HSE, says the ads were tested with their own focus groups, who came down in favour of what she terms a "peer-to-peer" approach.
"This conversational approach was the one that engaged with people. The whole idea about this is to be supportive of people making choices that are appropriate, not necessarily waving sticks at them," she says. "I spoke to a number of people . . .and they were saying they liked the fact that it was talking to them as opposed to talking at them."
The facts come half-way through the ads, as the voices draw on information produced by HSE research groups and data in the public domain, including figures from the Dublin City Coroner, which indicated that cocaine contributed to more deaths in Dublin last year than heroin and ecstasy.
This particularly impresses 21-year-old Matthew Holt. "The information, saying that cocaine kills more people than heroin and ecstasy combined, is very useful." Blaney agrees that the more factual information available in such campaigns, the better. "The facts really hit home and if you're any way intelligent you'll want to listen serious facts."
One ad explains that "mixing cocaine and alcohol makes you 24 times more likely to have a heart attack", which appeared to dramatically impact on those who heard the ads for the first time. Ger Naughton (29) is not impressed, however. "When you break it down, you're 24 times more likely to have a heart attack if you do cocaine and alcohol together, but you presume in the first place you're not all that likely to have a heart attack, so statistically it's insignificant, isn't it?"
Do they think that the scenarios depicted in the ads accurately reflect the reality they witness every weekend? "You'll have a few, your defences will be lowered and then someone will offer you a line, and you'll think why not?" asks one aimed at raising awareness about the dangers of mixing alcohol and cocaine.
Laura Cremen, who admits she knows several people who take cocaine, believes that the ad does not reflect the reality of how young people use cocaine. "If people are going out for a night, it's not that when they're drunk they suddenly think it's a good idea [ to take cocaine]," she says. "In general, the people who are doing it are going out with cocaine with them or thinking they're going to do it or having already done it before they go out. It's generally not so much a spur of the moment thing."
Gillian Groszewski (22) agrees. "The ads also seem to imply it's an impulsive thing you do on a night out rather than something you'd expect from a night out. One of the ads said you'd do this when your defences are down. I don't think that's true."
SO WHAT OF the campaign slogan: "The party's over"? Hanna says their research showed that cocaine was perceived as a recreational drug, which the reference to a party was intended to reflect. "It was tested with focus groups, as a number of slogans were, and that was the one that resonated best with them," says Hanna. "They thought it was very clear."
Matthew Holt is unimpressed, however. "It's a very severe slogan, 'the party's over, you can't have a good time'. It is linking the party with cocaine," he says. Kieran Leonard (26) is also unconvinced. He says he has never used cocaine, and thinks the ads will reinforce what people like him believe, rather than persuading users to change. "It's going to be somebody like me, who is concerned, as opposed to users, who are going to remember a line like that."
So what do the target audience think would work? "I think the car crash ads about drink driving, they were the ones that made the impact," says Cremen, pointing out that cocaine use is now more socially acceptable among a certain age group than drink driving. "You look at this [ HSE campaign], and there's no way they're going to have the same impact."
A distrust of information about drugs from Government-run institutions may be part of the problem, with those targeted looking for hard facts or real stories to give them a true sense of how cocaine can affect them. "Maybe getting people who have been there, seen the effects [ would work]," says Blaney. "It's better if it's coming from the heart rather than a script."