Greenpeace and Chemical Security Legislation

With two House Committees promising to mark-up chemical facility security legislation later this month, the public campaigns to pressure Congress to act are getting into full swing. Yesterday I looked at a mass email campaign, today we look at an edgy new video, Chemical Catastrophe, from Greenpeace that leads into a petition supporting “HR 5577 like legislation”. Description of Advertising Campaign The lead into the video is a blog by Michelle Frey. She introduces the video as a new “24 style video” produced by Greenpeace. She ends her blog posting on a positive note; “real change is possible! There are safer alternatives to some of these chemicals. And, we can increase security and regulations so the chemical plants and the transportation of these chemicals are done in a safer manner – protecting both you and I.” She then urges her readers to: “Take action today, check out our video and tell all your friends and family!” The video provides a variety of scenes of chemical facilities, fires, explosions, ambulances, and a dirty faced little girl with a bewildered look on her face. Interspersed are flashing graphics of factoids about chemical facilities, security, industry money, and the catch phrase that death could come in ‘as little as 24 minutes’. Filled with quick cuts and mono-colored stock shots this has the feel of a rock video; an effective device to catch the attention of a large portion of the target audience. At the bottom of the page where the video plays there is a box, boldly labeled as “Sign the Do Not Kill List” with a few more facts re-enforcing the content of the video. It also provides a link to the petition that is the whole point of the exercise. Greenpeace is trying to get as many people as possible to sign this petition to reinforce the point that “Congress needs to pass a bill like H.R. 5577 to protect Americans and make safer technologies mandatory for chemical plants”. Analysis of Campaign Greenpeace has been doing this sort of thing for years. They know their target audience, the young and socially involved. The blog and the video are all targeted very nicely at that audience. They are hitting on a single issue, IST, and calling for support of a ‘bill like HR 5577’ that includes much more. You do have to give them credit, they picked the most controversial portion of that bill (the part Greenpeace surely supports the most) to include in their campaign. This should get a large response. The political effectiveness of this campaign, like the mass email campaign I looked at yesterday, will depend on the number of signatures that they get on their petition. Realistically they will need to get a larger response than the email campaign; signatures on a petition (especially electronic ones like this) are not as impressive as numbers of emails. The advantage is that the petition will be delivered in person by someone the target Congressman knows. The same petition will be delivered to key people that Greenpeace already knows are sitting on the fence. They will be targeting this at those swing votes. Combine this with the email campaign and things start to get interesting. One last thing; this campaign kicked off yesterday. As of noon today (EST) the video had not yet shown up on YouTube®; it will. Greenpeace won’t put it there because the supporting pages and links would not appear with it. But, someone will put it up and it will catch a lot of additional attention. If Greenpeace is smart (and no one underestimates Greenpeace more than once) there will be a follow-up campaign in a month or so with a separate petition with slightly different wording.