Those who remember the 1988 video to promote the song will recall images of starving children, of old men in soup queues and evicted families pushing belongings along in shopping carts. That year, MTV reflected the horrors of the 20th century - of poverty, famine and genocide - to an audience of millions of teenagers.
Does Man in the Mirror have a negative or positive effect on audiences? Do viewers feel overwhelmed and despairing? Or are we encouraged to feel empowered to do something?
At the same time that MJ was at the top of the charts, Australian Sponsor-a-Child campaigns showed images of African children near-death and we were told that if we gave just $29 a month, we would save a life.
Today, aid organisations rarely portray the people that need our help as actually needing our help. Instead, child sponsorship advertising will focus on the outcomes and solutions.
I'd like to understand more about the philosophy of showing positive messages, rather than the need. Did organisations like World Vision and Oxfam make a strategic decision in order to combat audience apathy? Was there a belief that persistent negativity would fail to tell the whole story and were there concerns that this would have consequences for future giving?
Did donors respond in focus groups: "I don't like to see negative images on TV"? Did they say that starving children would not make them want to give?
If you show only the solution, your audience will not feel compelled to respond and fewer people will donate. As fundraisers, marketers and communicators, we all understand this, yet that knowledge is not often reflected.
It might be true to say that negative messages can discourage people from giving and even influence despair.
Perhaps negative messages give people the impression that the problem is unsolvable.
Along with apathy, a perception that the ‘problem is too big to fix’ is a charity’s worst enemy. And today, audiences are bombarded by problems that are too big to fix.
Footage of the war in Syria; the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and pictures of people fleeing in their millions is experienced by audiences between episodes of The Big Bang Theory, over bowls of Cornflakes, or on You-Tube. Are these images - presented in a 'business-as-usual' context - normalising death and suffering and excluding the human story from the narrative?
Does Michael’s video provide a Need and Solution dynamic? What emotions does it evoke in audiences?
To only show the positive outcome of a story is the same as only showing the starving children in need.
By not reflecting the whole story, aid organisations are providing inadequate context. The Need or Problem is absent from the narrative.
It's impossible for armchair viewers to identify the relationship between African families drowning in the Mediterranean on CNN, and a drinking well in a Somali village that means a little girl doesn't have to walk 30kms a day to get water.
The reason people aren't able to connect with refugees fleeing Syria is the same reason that they struggle to understand why Jorge in Bolivia needs their help. Without the broader narrative, audiences are being asked to fill in the blanks.
Child sponsorship needs to be presented within a context of Need, Hope and Solution.
Man in the Mirror is not reflecting anything that we cannot already see on television. However, audiences are not expected to make the connection between poverty, death and famine and what they can do to help. Instead, images of starving children reflect a clear Need which is answered by a Solution. The story inspires us and we are invited to play a role in the solution, rather than to be shown the end result without any context.
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