The following editorial appeared in the May 29th edition of the Guelph Mercury:
Eye-catching and graphic advertisements about student worker safety in circulation around the province may not have had such an impact locally had a Guelph woman not complained about one of the ads, a move that saw them pulled from public transit here and in nearby municipalities. The added attention is perhaps not the outcome the woman would have hoped for, but what is clear is that the ads should have stayed in place to reach the target audience of young people hunting for summer jobs.
Last year in Ontario, 101 workers lost their lives on the job, including 10 young people, and 353,000 injury claims were filed with the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. There is no question the ads are graphic, but that is what’s needed to get the attention of people who need to hear the message — teenagers. One ad featured a bloody ear on the ground next to a running shoe and another — the one targeted by the complainant — portrayed a young worker wearing a hard hat with a metal rod protruding from both sides of his head. Had they been given a chance beyond the approximately one week they’d been on Guelph Transit buses we think the ads would have gotten the attention of young people.
In 2005, the workplace compensation board in Nova Scotia surveyed young people to see what kind of advertising would get them to pay attention to workplace safety issues. Students clearly told the board the more graphic the advertising the more interested they would be. The board subsequently rolled out ads featuring an eyeball on an autopsy table.
Young people are hard to reach. They don’t like to listen to authority figures telling them what to do or think, so you have to reach them on their own terms — the teens surveyed in Nova Scotia said graphic advertising speaks to students who play gruesome video games and watch violence on television. The Ontario ads spoke to this demographic; they were hip and cartoonish and were hard to ignore. They are still available to view on the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board’s website and were still being aired at movie theatres on the weekend.
It is unfortunate that one complaint about an ad — the woman’s four-year-old child started crying when he saw one, prompting the complaint — has led to widespread removal of all the transit ads in Guelph and surrounding communities, including Kitchener-Waterloo. But on the upside, the controversy over the illustrations has likely piqued the curiosity of people who would never have seen them in the first place, and led them to seek out the ads. We hope teenagers are among those curious about the controversy.