“…it resolves itself into black and white.”
— Chris Rose
In this week’s episode, you’ll hear me come back to a story that serves as a clear case study of how the emotive argument always beats the cognitive one. The story involves a busload (literally) of grandmothers driving from London to Brussels carrying vials of their own blood, along with the lab results and photographs of their grandchildren. That was WWF, in the early 2000s, trying to shape a European law on industrial chemicals against an industry with more money, better lobbyists, and the technical argument sewn up. WWF won. The grandmothers, and those vials of blood are why.
For decades, “toxic chemicals in the environment” had been one of those issues nobody could hold in their hands. It's an issue that sounds too big, too technical, and even too grey, because so much of it is steeped in the abstract. So WWF decided to stop having that argument. It instead tested people’s blood and reduced the whole sprawling issue to a question a grandmother could put to a politician across a table: these chemicals are in my body, and nobody can prove they’re safe — are you all right with that, yes or no?
That case study is the core of How to Win Campaigns. Rose’s image for taking abstract concepts and making them real, is an aerial photograph of a city. From high up, the whole issue is grey. Zoom in on any one part, keep zooming in, and eventually it comes down to black and white. In your blood or not.
Somewhere inside every enormous grey issue there’s a point where it stops being a matter of degree and becomes a straight choice — and that point is where a winnable campaign lives.
Reduction looks like simplification, and the principled part of us flinches at it. But what it really does is decide which picture of the issue people end up carrying around. If we don’t decide that, someone else will.
If you’ve spent any time with Walter Lippmann — the first book we did on this show — you already know why this works. Lippmann’s argument was that none of us act on the world directly. We act on the pictures of the world in our heads, assembled secondhand from fragments.
If we go back to the case study above, the industry’s picture in the chemicals fight was a single word — workability. If you let that be the question, the answer writes itself, because who could possibly know what’s workable except the people who make the chemicals?
And sometimes, a black-and-white picture wins, even if it doesn’t contain accurate facts.
By contrast, WWF’s picture was a bag of blood. The whole fight was over whose black-and-white question the public would end up answering.
The campaign that made Rose’s name was Greenpeace against Shell over the Brent Spar oil platform in 1995, which involved a David-and-Goliath occupation complete with water cannons and consumer boycotts. Greenpeace won completely.
And yet, Greenpeace was actually wrong on the substance of the debate.
These are the basic conditions for a winning campaign, no matter the facts of the case.
Their central claim about how much oil and toxic waste the platform held was overstated by a wide margin. They apologized to Shell that September, and the independent studies that followed suggested deep-sea disposal had most likely been the better environmental option all along.
The campaigners were wrong on the facts and won.
The company was right on the facts, and lost.
That’s how powerful a campaign is when it finds the black-and-white frame, applies the “photo test”, chooses the right antagonist, and finds a victim with a voice.
Rose writes from the environmental NGO seat, and he defaults to its examples — polar bears, blood tests, Brussels. It would be easy to decide none of it applies if you do corporate or institutional work, where there are no grandmothers and no obvious villain. Don’t let that distract you. This book has traveled well for me, as it serves as a constant check on whether I have found the human being at the centre of the campaign.
Almost everything we do, underneath, is advocacy on behalf of someone. Rose’s standing question — who is the victim here, and can they speak? — is one corporate teams may not ask enough.