Advertising as High Art: Watch This Piece About the Importance of First Aid

All advertising, creative or not, has one main goal — to attract people’s attention, and ultimately, sell a product. Now, shining a creative light on trivialities can prove a hard task, and even feel pointless at times. But a product of real value and meaning, like first aid, can be a rich soil for powerful advertising to flourish.

“It’s easier to get hyped for a product that brings us immediate benefit. Something we imagine ourselves using over and over again, even though we might not even truly need. Do you imagine yourself saving someone’s life? Probably not, unless it’s in a Hollywood-like scenario where you become the hero that gets the girl and saves the day. But performing first aid to someone – how often does that come up in anyone’s imagination?”

That said, there’s hardly anything more meaningful than saving someone’s life.

Paradoxically, some of the most important and biggest movements in life are the hardest to spark and drive forward. Steps to prevent climate change, global warming, extreme poverty – those are global concerns to all mankind, yet few of us bother with. Why? It’s hard to relate to a starving kid, drinking contaminated water in a place of the world we haven’t even heard of. It’s easier to get hyped for a product that brings us immediate benefit. Something we imagine ourselves using over and over again, even though we might not even truly need. Do you imagine yourself saving someone’s life? Probably not, unless it’s in a Hollywood-like scenario where you become the hero that gets the girl and saves the day. But performing first aid to someone – how often does that come up in anyone’s imagination?

This is what great creative advertising does best – it puts you in a position you could picture yourself, or someone you know, clear as day, often via situations you might not have even come close to envisioning. Great advertising makes you relate. If you haven’t seen Collateral Beauty (and you should), Will Smith explains that advertising revolves around one question: “Why?” Why do you do what you do, why would you buy this product? Why would you sign up for first aid classes if you’ve never needed them, or never knew anyone who did?

This creative ad utilizes a simple tool that great advertising, and many other non-related fields, in fact, employ – research. Research can be the extra mile between the trivial and the special, the “extra” in front of “ordinary.” It is research that made this ad truly relateable. By statistically putting it up against a much more tangible, scarier, infamous monster such as cancer, the ad reveals the true difference first aid can make.

Did you know that first aid saves the same amount of lives as cancer takes annually? Neither did I.

The creative ad is a perfect example of a films meet ads. It has a crisp storyline that doesn’t waste a single frame. It sinks you right into a story that exults profound human sadness and tragedy. It takes you through a journey too many unfortunate people have gone through. From receiving the bad news, to delivering it to your family, to the slow and painful road to recovery whose dreamed destination is one not many people are lucky enough to reach. It makes you cringe and root for all the characters. And as you start sensing the calm of a happy resolution and wondering what the ad is all about, it snatches it away, just as an absurd accident would sneak up on you in real life and take everything away.

I’m not going include a call to action for taking first aid classes. If this ad doesn’t, then nothing can.