Reaching The TV Generation

Every eye in the room locked-on to the spider-like movements of a rock climber dangling on a thin rope 500 feet above a river canyon. This was a first for ABC Company's benefits administrator. Thanks to the television set playing this compelling image, she had the attention of every employee in the room. As the climber grasped for a hand-hold, a narrator talked about "getting a grip on your financial future." The 20-minutes sped by as the combination of visual images, narration, graphics, sounds and music communicated retirement plan investment concepts, asset classes and asset allocation profiles. As she pushed "STOP" on the VCR, this administrator felt as if this were the first time many of these employees actually connected with her message. She had been trying for years to reach them -- particularly the younger workers -- using a combination of print materials. But only a few of her most sophisticated plan participants appeared to take interest in the written word. Now she had found a communications tool that reached everybody!

This is a fictional example. But it is representative of what literally hundreds of plan sponsors have said about the benefits of video and the problem with print communications. In fact, a growing mountain of evidence suggests that if you want to reach 401(k) plan participants with your messages, you had better use video in your media mix. By developing and using video (and interactive multimedia) educational programs, plan sponsors can communicate investment values that positively influence participant attitudes and behaviors in the direction of enrollment and saving. Video can accomplish this more effectively than traditional print materials through the application of metaphors and stories that entertain, motivate and educate your audience. Using video, you can tap a broader range of responses from participants, including their emotions and unconscious thought patterns, to help achieve plan communication and educational goals. And you can do this without the need to provide the kind of overt advice that fiduciaries fear might increase the liability risks associated with plan education.

In addition, survey and anecdotal evidence suggest that the use of video is necessary because the average employee is unwilling or unable to read his or her 401(k) plan information. Even though plan sponsors have attempted to sweeten the plan information package by adding a layer-cake of newsletters, payroll stuffers, handouts, pamphlets and other documents, fiduciaries still pull their hair because these materials, more often than not, go unread. Television is both a cause of and a solution to this print literacy problem. TV has conditioned a generation of employees to crave the fast, visual and entertaining information that spills out of their TV sets vs. drier, more difficult print information. TV information comes in the form of news, sit-coms, movies, sports, documentaries, talk shows and -- especially -- commercials. The advertising industry has learned during the past 40 years that people respond to the metaphorical themes and images that appear in TV commercials.

In this report we'll look at the factors that make video such a powerful medium for today's plan participants, including why you should use it and how you can develop cost-effective videos that incorporate many of the same metaphorical techniques for reaching people that TV producers and advertising agencies use. You can produce and distribute these programs to individual participants or show them to large and small groups as part of a communication campaign that includes other electronic and print media, as well as face-to-face interaction and feedback.

Participant Communications -- The Current Situation

There is sorry little evidence today that 401(k) plan participants are being reached, let alone educated, by current methods of plan communication and education. A New York Life and Gallup Organization survey asked plan participant respondents to rate their familiarity with five basic investment concepts. The results show that for four of five investment concepts, about three-quarters of the respondents expressed unfamiliarity or only vague familiarity. These include compounding, inflationary impact, asset allocation and age's relation to risk. In the exception -- advantages of tax deferral -- nearly two-thirds of respondents expressed unfamiliarity. Equally troubling, virtually none of the respondents indicated that they base their asset allocation decisions on long-term investment objectives.

What's wrong with this snapshot is that even though most employees don't know the first thing about investing, 401(k) plans "empower" them to determine their own financial futures. Empowerment, or the process of driving control of plan investments down to the participant level, is what the Department of Labor Section 404(c) regulations are all about, reflecting a general trend in retirement benefits away from employer paternalism. Under 404(c), plan sponsors are charged to inform and empower participants to make their own investment decisions. Information is the key to meeting this obligation. This generally takes the form of printed information such as Summary Plan Descriptions (SPDs), prospectuses and other investment-related documents. Despite its mandate to "inform," the regulations don't provide guidelines for plan sponsors seeking to offer general investment education. In the meantime, the terms "informed" and "knowledgeable" do not appear to apply to most plan participants.

Declining Print Literacy in America

One of the primary reasons for this problem and why plan communicators must consider using video today is that most Americans are TV literate, but many are not print literate, and many more read at very low comprehension levels. Over 25 million of your fellow adult Americans are functionally illiterate. In everyday life, this means they can't read the newspaper (including the captions over their favorite comics), they can't read the assembly instructions that come with the kids' Christmas toys, and they generally can't fill out a job application.

This apparent trend toward declining print literacy in the U.S. is not merely a condition of poor Americans or a figment in the imaginations of right-wing, back-to-basics fanatics. SAT scores have been on a fifteen-year decline -- even the "most talented young people are showing diminished verbal skills," says Professor E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in his best-selling book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. He says that executives of major corporations, including CBS and Exxon, are growing alarmed that the best and the brightest of their middle-level executives can "no longer communicate their ideas effectively in speech or writing." Men and women in their 20s and 30s have come into the work force without the print and verbal skills they need to compete effectively in our existing business organizations and the international economy.

Declining print literacy is one of the primary reasons why it's getting more difficult to address print messages to specific plan participant audiences. Another problem is that many communicators write above the comprehension level of many plan participants, who quickly lose interest in dry investment jargon. Many communicators say that the average plan participant would have trouble reading the material that your 10- to 13-year-old child brings home from school -- so much for the SPD or anything else that involves complicated concepts, multisyllables and sentences extending to 30 words or more.

The TV Culture

Media gurus, such as the late Canadian scholar and pop culture icon Marshall McLuhan, have suggested that television has changed the very meaning of the word "literacy." It can't be applied today as it was 50 years ago. According to the McLuhan school of thought, television has replaced print as the primary way in which we understand and communicate about our world, including socio-economic topics such as retirement and investing. TV has become, in the words of one media expert, the "command center" from which we get the information we need to make decisions about what to buy and what's important and what's not. Television is the primary source of news and opinion for most people on nearly every relevant topic, from politics to healthcare -- to personal finance.

In his milestone book Understanding Media, McLuhan writes, "Before TV, there had been much concern about why Johnny couldn't read. Since TV, Johnny has acquired an entirely new set of perceptions. He is not at all the same." What McLuhan is saying, and a number of his colleagues agree, is that TV and other electronic media have made a clean sweep of the print media environment that existed from the Renaissance to the end of World War I when movies and radio took off. In the early 1960s, the maverick media scholar fired an international shot heard 'round the world when he said, in essence, that the culture of print is doomed; that television and books, standard bearers of two very different cultures, cannot co-exist. Communicators still hotly debate his theory today.

Nevertheless, it is a fact that for a generation, slick television and highly visual print advertising campaigns have helped effect a fundamental change in the way we as Americans think and behave. It is estimated that by the time the average American has turned 20 years old, he or she has watched over 20,000 hours of television. This enormous amount of TV viewing has created the kaleidoscopic consumer culture in which we all live. Think about this next time you spend Sunday afternoon shopping at the mall instead of gathering around the family dinner table. Or count the number of sexy beer commercials during a Monday Night Football game and then note which brand of beer you're drinking. Plan communicators are fighting upstream against a gush of competing messages coming in from all directions encouraging employees to be active consumers, not savers. The average 60-minute TV show is interrupted by some 25 commercial breaks. Your plan participants are under such a constant programming and advertising bombardment that they're shell shocked! It takes real skill to break through the clutter with a message, and most importantly it requires the effective use of TV because that's where people are getting their information today.

TV Brain Waves

About the time they began to notice that television was having a massive cultural influence on society, researchers began to detect a growing tendency toward "right-brain" thinking in our culture. Until the last 50 years or so, the analytical "left-brain" bias dominated Western culture. And there is still a strong left-brain bias operating all around us. But, as McLuhan was fond of pointing out, having a left-brain bias today is something like driving down the road at 90 miles per hour while looking in the rear view mirror.

Brain-wave studies, cited by Bruce R. Powers and Marshall McLuhan in a little book with the famous title The Global Village, confirm that television has an effect on mental activity that goes far beyond the messages sent via the TV set. In one study, researchers compared the responses of subjects to print and television. The TV was turned on while one subject read. As soon as she looked up, her brain waves slowed significantly. "Within thirty seconds, she was in a predominantly alpha state -- relaxed, passive, unfocused." The media researcher responsible for these findings, Herbert Krugman, was attempting to refute McLuhan's seemingly outlandish media theories. Instead, he writes: "[T]he predominantly right brain response to TV, and even perhaps to what we call print advertising -- all suggests that in contrast to teaching (a left-brain process), the unique power of the electronic media is to shape the content of people's imagery (a right-brain process), and in that particular way determine their behavior and their views."

The Power of Metaphor

Recent investigations into right-brain/left-brain functions do seem to indicate that TV has a greater role to play in employee benefits education and training. As textual print is to the left brain, TV images are to the right brain. Therefore, a total communication/education program will take into account both right- and left-brain ways of perceiving and understanding.

What rational, left-brain scientific research tells us is that television is a medium that allows you to submerge your rational, subject-object analytical nature in favor of active identification and participation with a metaphor or a story (stories are often extended metaphors). Some of the most effective metaphors in use today appear in 60-second commercials and longer "infomercials." These commercials generally work on two levels: (1) they have a direct product message component; (2) they have a more subliminal metaphorical component. At this second level, metaphorical characters, images, narrative events and other symbols mean something important to members of a culture who are attuned to them. For example, a running shoe commercial showing a woman grinding her way up a steep hill at dawn is a modern American metaphor: fit is young, strong, free, self-sufficient, happy, etc. An additional message is that a woman can be heroic in the traditional American sense, i.e., rugged, self-sufficient, hard-working, and so on. Many commercials, TV shows and movies move us today because they are based on deeply ingrained unconscious patterns of thought that charge certain metaphors and symbols with the unconscious energy and power to "fascinate and compel" us, according to Psychologist Sal Randazzo in a recently published book called Mythmaking on Madison Avenue.

On video tape, metaphorical content can be treated explicitly or implicitly. Explicit metaphors treat the subject in an A is B way. An explicit treatment might compare investing with sailing. The narrator would board a sailboat and we'd see plenty of shots of the boat on the water and close-ups of the narrator talking as he explained how sailing and investing are alike. "A sailboat has to tack in order to work its way against the wind. Just like a sailboat, you have to set your sights on a goal and invest, moving up and down with the market in the short run in order to hit your long-term financial goals." An implicit treatment is more subtle. A is simply placed along side B without a direct reference. A simple example of this is using a shot of a sailboat tacking against the wind while a narrator, on or off camera (he or she might as well be on the dock or in a studio), talks about the average investor's efforts to reach his or her goal by investing in assets that move up and down with the market. Existing video productions have intentionally and unintentionally used metaphors, including rock climbers "getting to the top" and gardeners "cultivating their investments" to communicate retirement investment values.

Creating a Metaphor

How can you create a metaphor or story for video (that also can be applied to print and other media) that will reach and influence your plan participants? A very cost-effective plan communications video and workbook program (the total production cost was under $50,000) was recently produced that used the simple implicit juxtaposition of metaphorical and educational content to get its point across. The metaphor used for this educational video reflects one of the most basic ways we orient ourselves in our world: more is up and less is down. In other words, saving enough money for retirement is reaching the top; not saving enough is staying where you are, or going down. To effectively communicate this message, the implicit visual background story involves a rock climber making a journey to the top of a massive rock formation. On the explicit level, the narrator, who is somewhere on or around the rock formation throughout the video, simply informs people that they need to invest for the future. He provides factual content to support his argument, including remarks encouraging people to read the supporting workbook. On the implicit, metaphorical level, the video is a visual (there are no speaking roles) journey to the top of the rock with the climber, who stumbles and falls back once or twice, but inexorably makes his way to the top. The visuals are accompanied by powerful sound effects and music. In addition to the "more is up" metaphor, the sub-themes supporting this second level of the story include (1) looking at investing as a challenge to be met and overcome in the traditional American way -- like crossing the prairie in a covered wagon or building the Panama Canal or sending a man to the moon -- and (2) taking calculated risks. Moreover, the climber in this video is in his mid-20s to encourage younger people to identify with him and to support one of the most important messages in the video: when it comes to retirement plan investing, start early on your way to the top!

To develop a video metaphor or story to help communicate your plan message, you must select the metaphor and the symbolic elements that make up the metaphor: the theme, the venue, the narrative events, and the characters. In the case of the above-mentioned video, the basic metaphor is "more is up," and the theme is "reach for the top," which is something all plan participants must do to succeed with their investments. Producers selected the venue for its outstanding scenic beauty, its appropriateness for the theme, and its vastness when compared with the climber. It was necessary to establish a towering natural obstacle for the climber to overcome. The events are the ups and downs and milestones of the story: man against the rock. The rock climber is essentially a classical American hero, like the cowboy or the captain of a starship (male or female).

The hero's role is to overcome the odds and win. The hero learns from experience and from those around him, and then performs a decisive action that leads to ultimate success. In the process, the hero faces tough choices and risks, but he usually wins the day. Because of this, the traditional type of hero is a good character for communicating plan and investment values. In addition, the on-camera narrator can take on the role of the main character in your video, or you might position him or her as a mentor to a background character with whom the audience identifies. In this way, the narrator is someone the viewer listens to in the context of the metaphor.

We've been discussing one specific example of the use of metaphor to help you communicate your plan message in an entertaining, motivating and educational way. There are many other basic metaphors that lend themselves to plan participant education. Below are just a few examples of metaphors that you can use as the core of a powerful video and/or multimedia program:

• The future is a destination. We all share this basic way of orienting ourselves in the world. You look "forward" to the future. You have to "map out a course" to your future and "make adjustments" on the way. The future generally is "over the horizon" just out of sight. If you "start early," you can save enough money to meet your needs by the time you "arrive" at the future. If you don't save enough now, there's no telling what you will "run in to." The last thing you want to do is "drift" aimlessly toward your future or "hit a snag" or run into "rough weather." These metaphorical expressions are potential themes that could be developed into audio-visual metaphors and stories, including: (1) A sailboat tacks toward the future in a sea of uncertainty. (2) An airplane crew files their flight plan and follows it to a destination. (3) Video of the Apollo Moon Mission dramatically illustrates the theme of plotting a course and arriving at a goal.
• Life is a journey. A journey defines a path to be followed. Therefore, we think in terms of staying "on the right path" and moving in the "right direction." If you're on a path, you can "fall behind," have trouble "catching up," or be forced to take a "detour." You can make a "beeline" or "go around in circles" if that's where your path leads you. A path is a surface, so we think in terms of being "on" the path or getting "off" the path. Moreover, a journey is a direction and progress toward a goal. All of these metaphorical expressions are potential themes that could be developed into audio-visual metaphors and stories, including: (1) A group of mountain bikers follow different paths to their destinations. Some stay on the flat, smooth road; others take to the hills. Each path represents a different degree of risk and an asset allocation strategy. (2) A narrator uses a maze to demonstrate how hard it can be to get to your financial goal unless you have information and use it to find the right path. (3) Traffic, types of roads, road conditions, different speeds, sign posts and other symbols are used to convey important plan information. For example, skid marks warn people away from "slamming on the brakes" and pulling out of an investment when the market is down.
• Time is money. In our culture time is a commodity that can literally "run out." Most of us "budget" our time, "manage" our time, or are "poor managers" of time. Some of us "save" time, while others "waste" it or "borrow" it (he's living on borrowed time). If time is money, the more time you have, the more money you have; to be late is to be poor. Of course, some people live on the "installment plan," one day at a time. They never have enough time or money. Starting early to build a retirement program is not just a nice slogan, it is a metaphor to encourage people to use their time more "profitably." Possible audio-visual metaphors for "time is money" include: (1) An early riser gets a jump on everyone compared with a late riser who generally winds up at the end of the line. (2) A semi-comic father-time figure plays the role of narrator and uses his hour glass to indicate that time can "run" out on you if you don't invest. (3) A time machine instantly converts one dollar into a pile of money thanks to tax-free compounding. Dials on the time machine allow the user to adjust his investment allocation to include high-risk and lower-risk investments, thus affecting the size of the pile of money over time.
• The future is a structure. Another cultural attribute of Americans is that we "build" the future. One of the primary "building blocks" of the future is money. In fact, money is the "foundation" of our future. To have a "strong foundation," we invest money in our 401(k) plan. With a strong foundation, you can build higher (remember, up is more). Of course, if you don't invest for the future, it might "collapse" in a heap. (1) Different types of buildings illustrate possible retirement allocations, including a prefabricated hut for no investment, a secure castle for conservative investment and a futuristic geodesic dome for a well-diversified investment portfolio. (2) A building blue-print is compared with developing an investment plan and following it to your financial goal. (3) A condemned building is used as a backdrop to discuss the dangers of not investing for the future. In the end the building is dynamited and dramatically collapses to the ground.

Using TV as a Teaching Tool

The bottom line is that plan sponsors should use television in concert with other media in an entertaining format designed to appeal to the average member of the TV generation. These programs should be more than "print-to-video" presentations featuring a talking head and color graphics. This means that they should incorporate a second level of communication that reaches people through their right-brains. This is accomplished using audio-visual metaphors that entertain and motivate as part of the overall approach to teaching the subject of investment plans and investing -- a subject, by the way, that can be extremely dry and arcane, particularly for people who are not familiar with it and don't necessarily care about it.

How do you use television in an entertaining, motivating and educational way to reach plan participants? The key elements of such a multimedia communications product include:

• Make each program a complete package. Today's teleconscious plan participants are used to their programs beginning and ending within a set period of time. They don't like dangling threads of information and loose ends. In the metaphorical paradigm of TV, a story can take 30 seconds or 30 minutes to tell or show, while the average camera shot is about three to five seconds in duration. What matters is that your program hold the viewer long enough to complete its mission. Some of the most effective "stories" on TV today are 60-second commercials. The best ones make their point while holding you riveted to your TV set.
• Remove most of the jargon and complexity from the subject matter. As media critic Neil Postman is fond of saying, TV doesn't argue propositions, perplex the viewer or offer complex sequential information. The word that best describes an informational format that does without these elements is -- entertainment. Unfortunately, many videos are produced as print-adapted-to-TV pieces, complete with a presenter talking from a fixed camera position. The only break from this "talking head" is the cut-aways to graphs and charts. But these provide no relief. Most of these graphics were designed originally to be used as print handouts and contain much too much detail for the participative medium of television. Here's the challenge: Design TV graphics that can communicate a message in under five seconds. If you can do this, you're in the ball park.
• Provide a visual metaphor that makes the content easy to assimilate and remember. We've covered this point in detail already. But it can't be stated strongly enough. TV is a metaphorical communications medium which is best used to convey dynamic visual images with supporting narration, sound and music. A caveat: fancy 3-D graphics and special effects are a standard of today's television, and they are becoming less costly to add to your video production. But don't use these elements unless they enhance your story or help you make your point. All too often, they are used only as expensive attention-getters. In the worse cases, they actually detract from the story. Moreover, good graphics can't salvage a bad story or inconsistent metaphor.
• Support video programming with print. But make sure that the print is designed in a "TV" format. This means that it is visually stimulating and very easy to read. You'll notice that the most attractive print pieces today appear as visual "works of art." Television is the primary reason most of us like colorful, highly visual graphic designs. Just compare today's standards in print design to those of 40 years ago and you'll see what I mean. TV is influencing every other medium in the mix. Video works well with group presentations, audio tapes, slide shows, USA Today-style newsletters (a copy of the TV format), posters, and condensed, bulleted information.

Summary

In response to declining employee print literacy and the ascendancy of television in our culture, plan sponsors should develop video and interactive multimedia educational programs. These programs should utilize audio-visual metaphors to support the main message and to generate changes in participant attitudes and behaviors by communicating with the participant's conceptualizing right-brain as well as his rational left-brain. McLuhan and Powers sum up the situation nicely: "The United States by 2020 will achieve a distinct psychological shift from a dependence on visual, uniform, homogeneous thinking, of a left-hemisphere variety, to a multi-faceted configurational mentality which we have attempted to define as audile-tactile, right-hemisphere thinking. . . . One could make a case that twenty-five years of television viewing has already set the stage for this psychic shift when one considers that the average North American family spends seven and a half hours a day in front of the cathode ray tube." It is not going too far to say that the use of video is a must for 401(k) plan communications now. It will become only more necessary as the psychic shift from left to right progresses into the next century. As television and its allied electronic media, including the computer, continue to gain dominance over print, the use of proven audio-visual techniques, including metaphor, will become more and more important to help plan communicators and educators reach people with their messages and effect changes that help achieve plan goals and objectives.

Steve Finegan (steve@hunt.com) is President of The Huntington Group, Inc., an employee benefits communication/production firm headquartered in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Originally published October 21, 1994. Copyright 1994 Steve G. Finegan. Reprinted on BenefitsLink, Inc. by permission.