Jess Crombie on empathy and the contributor-led approach
Jess Crombie is a consultant helping NGOs to deliver their stories powerfully and ethically. The former Global Content Director at Save The Children created content ranging from VR to participatory projects with children to experiential events, winning Save the Children awards including Cannes Lion Gold and Silver, a Clio, and a Silver British Arrow. She’s now working with the likes of the United Nations' World Food Programme, the British and Swedish Red Cross, Sightsavers and the International Rescue Committee.
Crombie is also a senior lecturer on documentary image making and ethics at London College of Communication (UAL). She commissioned and co-authored The People in the Pictures, a groundbreaking piece of research asking those who feature in NGO content their opinions on both the process of sharing their stories and their final portrayal. Following this research Jess founded and now co-chairs the Bond-sponsored People in the Pictures working group, set up to bring about sector-wide change towards more ethical practises in the creation and use of images of poverty.
Here, Crombie explores empathy in some of the activations and campaigns in the 2021 D&AD Awards winning work.
Oh #wombstories how I love you. Not since This Girl Can have I watched an advert that speaks to my heart and self. That sidelong viewing style that means most ads only partially pierce my consciousness was abandoned. Sucked in, I cried ugly snotty tears of recognition and relief that someone had finally communicated these truths that impact so many women.
And who did this communicating? Not the advertising Voice of God, the impersonal words of the brand. It was the words and stories and testimony of people with wombs sharing their lived experiences. Their wombs personified, both angel and devil, with the potential to bring joy and the most terrible sadness and suffering.
For a long time advertisers worked on the idea that aspiration drove marketing – the notion that wishing you were more like someone else, or had something else, would drive audiences to engage. But now we swing away from aspiration towards connection – it’s not about wishing you could be like someone else, but instead recognising how like someone else you already are. That there is power in this recognition, this empathetic connection.
There are many brands trying to do this, but very few get it right, because it’s really hard to create true connection. Why then did #wombstories get so right?
“it’s not about wishing you could be like someone else, but instead recognising how like someone else you already are”
Firstly, AMV BBDO achieved true authenticity, the holy grail of storytelling in 2021. They did this by slowing themselves to be completely led by the experiences of people with wombs. It was clear that the creative team had spent time, real time, listening to those experiences and learning from them. I call this the contributor-led approach. Rather than deciding what story you want to tell and then finding someone who fits it, you listen to contributor experiences (those affected by the issue you want to talk about) and then reflect them back at your audience (also affected by this issue). In therapy this is called mirroring, and it is one of the most powerful ways to demonstrate that you are hearing what someone else is telling you; and being properly heard is an immensely connecting experience.
Another winner from this year’s awards is Macmillan’s Whatever It Takes, which also showed this research, contributor-led approach in their film, which is so obviously inspired by real stories and the experiences of those nurses in all their unvarnished, raw power. It feels authentic to see your experiences reflected, mirrored back at you, you know that you have been heard.
Secondly, the details. There are many clichés about the importance of detail, but in communication, it is the detail that so often means the difference between flat, inauthentic information transfer, and real storytelling. The moment in #wombstories when the pregnant woman plucked her nipple hair took from me interested to invested. You could see from the faces of those visiting the perfectly recreated room scenes from the heartbreaking Just A Wall that it was the painstaking attention that the creative team had paid to the details of those children’s homes that delivered the sucker punch. Why? Because they make it real to us as viewers – we can see the connections to our own experiences as those who love people who have had cancer, who have listened to a child being shouted at a bit too aggressively and wondered if you should intervene, and yeah, I’ll admit it, to plucking our nipple hair.
Just a Wall, ROSAPARK
Finally, underpinning all of this, and most importantly of all, it is about ceding control to the contributor. In #wombstories we see the brand being entirely led by the contributors who share their experiences; their voices all over the script and the resulting content, quite literally sometimes with verbatim testimony. The process of telling real stories is so often started by deciding what we as creatives want to say and then finding stories which back up those decisions. But it’s the wrong way round. When we are making issue-based communications, we need to start by going to those with lived experience and asking them two very simple questions – what stories do you want to tell? How do you want to tell them? And then really hearing and being led by their responses.
With issue-based communications, if you do not run a contributor-led approach, you will fail the authenticity test. It will smell inauthentic and tokenistic to those with lived experience of your issue, and they won’t engage.
“This way of working moves us from aspiration to connection, from othering to empathy”
What of the ethics of working with real people, people who may be vulnerable? The process of sharing editorial control should include consent – not a signed model release, but an ongoing dialogue where the contributor is explained the purpose of the communications in the same way that you would explain it to a colleague. You should show them the scripts, and the drafts, and listen to their feedback, and act upon it, and then check in afterwards on how they feel about the work when it is out in the world. This dialogue will enhance everyone’s experience and the outcomes.
This way of working moves us from aspiration to connection, from othering to empathy, not enough, and not perfectly (even #wombstories is far too white and far too middle class to be truly representative), but with cautious steps towards valuing and prioritising our shared humanity.