What I think ‘Ocean’ gets right (and people often get wrong)
Three biases that get in the way of seeing good comms for what they are
Fresh out of a cinema screening of David Attenborough’s Ocean, and I think it’s an excellent bit of nature comms, I really do.
Other opinions are available. I read this thoughtful post by Luke McMillan just now. Tl;dr: Luke says Ocean is undeniably powerful and beautiful, but he’s not sure it’ll stir people to the mobilisation truly needed to make governments protect the seas. He hopes that’s wrong, and so do I.
Disclaimer: I wrote most of this piece in my head on the way back from the flicks before I’d seen Luke’s piece so it shouldn’t be read as any kind of direct retort to him. Luke knows far, far more about ocean campaigning than I ever will. And he is right. I too don’t think Ocean is a film that will chivvy people to leave the cinema / their sofa, make placards, and stand outside Whitehall demanding their MP bans bottom trawling immediately. I just don’t think Ocean was ever meant to do that, and I don’t think any single film could - or for any piece of mass culture broadcast, should.
Three biases that confuse us about good comms
First up, let’s be real. Don’t trust anyone who says there is definitely one right way to do climate / nature etc comms. Including me. This is as much an art as a science, and a fast-developing one at that.
The strategy for what and how you communicate something critically depends on who you want to reach, the way you are communicating to them - and to what end - what the hell you want them to do or feel when you’re done. So - it depends; it always depends.
We know this in real life. You talk to your gran differently, via different mediums, and to different ends to how you talk to your best mate. Politicians get steel miners to vote for them for different reasons, and in different tones, to university lecturers. And that’s OK - that’s how things are; maybe things shouldn’t ought to be like that, but they are.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t decent heuristics and a growing evidence base to fall back on to guide how you talk to people about the planet. But it’s never off the shelf. Nothing beats working backwards from the change you’re trying to make in the world, thinking about what you have at your disposal by way of effectively reaching them, and cannily planning accordingly.
I say that because that nuance matters. I often see people kneejerking to attack any given bit of climate/nature comms as crap [again, I wrote this before reading Luke’s piece! Sorry Luke].
But I think three biases are usually getting in the way.
Taste Bias. Assuming that because something didn’t work for them personally, it’s not going to work for other people. No piece of comms can work for everyone, and as above, the best comms are targeted to a particular audience and desired reaction. Parking our own taste bias can be especially hard for those of us that have been banging around for a while. Particularly if I already get something is important, it’s a good thing if it’s communicating in a different kind of way to what would work on me, as long as it’s doing it in a way that’ll work for its audience
(This of course works the other way round. I really liked Ocean and it worked for me, because it pushed my reverence/wonder/awe/God-haunted buttons. So perhaps this entire article is an exercise in taste bias. Maybe I alone in the universe will like it. But I suspect not.)Activism bias. Look, shit is really urgent and complicated, and absolutely nothing about (eg) saving the seas or avoiding runaway climate change is easy. This complexity generally frustrates distillation to a snappy piece of comms.
Progressive Activists - only some 11-13% of the population, but overwhelmingly the kind of people I hang around with online - want to fix things, and know that fixing things is about more than tugging a few heart strings and sending a postcard to your MP. To say nothing of the venality and fuckedupedness of the systems that affect whether anything can or will be done about any of it - economics, power, wealth, all of it.
But progressive activists (eg, me) are weird, and in a bit of a bubble. We’re particularly prone to thinking people who don’t agree with us are being manipulated, rather than just different in temperament. Truth is most people a) really care about nature, but b) aren’t and won’t ever be activists, so there’s no point expecting them to respond to a call to political ‘action’. Certainly not in the sense of persistently haranging MPs until they promise to change the world. Especially not about something like what’s going on in the oceans.
British people have a deep connection to the sea, but it’s still a big wet thing over there. What can I do about that? It’s not a strange thing to think, you know, for most people.
What works for activists almost certainly won’t work for ‘normal’ people, and that’s OK. If comms about the ruination of our seas or atmosphere or any of the rest of it feels to me, a cynical activist, to be slightly facile, mawkish or simplistic - well perhaps it’s pitched about right. But it doesn’t mean it’s not landing.Action bias. The closest we do get to a genuine golden rule in comms is: don’t just freak people out about how bad something is - you have to give them a sense of hope and agency, or they shut down and go quiet. (Even this, it’s worth noting, depends a bit on your audience. Some people feed better off anger and pain than most.)
But - and this really is important - one bit of comms does not have to do all those things by itself. Some comms can inspire. Some comms can galvanise. Some comms is part of big values soup stuff. Some comms connects it to daily life and practical action. It is all needed. A great bit of comms in one space just means we need more comms in the rest of the spaces, not that that comms has somehow failed.
One attack that could definitely be levelled at Ocean is it may leave the viewer feeling a) ah phew, looks like it might be OK and b) there’s not much I can do about this myself either way. I mean I didn’t take either message personally, but I can totally see that some might. But then that’s where you need the other stuff, isn’t it? The activist campaigns and the supermarket boycotts and the school projects and the newspaper stories and all the rest of it. Behind which, in this case, sits the well-told this is why you should care story that makes the rest of it work much better.
So why I think Ocean works
Two reasons.
Firstly because it feels to me like it has a pretty clear audience in mind - global politicians, leaders, and the soiree of sorts that influence them, share beds with them, and reach the people that can push their buttons. The donors, philanthropists, movers and Attenborough-loving shakers that nibble like cookiecutter sharks on the big fish.
Also it has a pretty clear moment in mind: the 2025 UN Conference on the Oceans. Where it wants those politicians to do the right thing.
And to do this it combines three unfairly large weapons:
some ultra HD seriously powerful footage of the destruction of the seas - the camera attached to the bottom trawling net will stay with me for a while
Coldplay (who remain, for reasons that escape me, astronomically popular)
And third, and most unfairly of all, the emotional blackmail of Sir David looking into their eyes and saying, in effect, I’m going to die soon, and this is what I want you to do in my name.
Now I could be wrong of course about whether this film will have that desired effect, and I’m happy to defer about the specifics to people closer both to the UN process in question and the type of moneymen and people in posh work clothes that hang around it.
But I do think it feels like comms carefully calibrated to make people like that feel something - not just an emotional reaction to the ravaging of the ocean, but the sense of history having (as Mr Blair once said) its hand on their shoulders. And the risk of Sir Dave coming back to haunt them when he’s gone.
The other reason I think it works, frankly, is because Attenborough’s stuff always works. Not for getting people out on the streets. But for hardening the values that allow all of the other campaigns, mobilisations, and the rest of it to fall on fertile ground. His telly is reverence porn. Bigger-than-me stuff. Awe and wonder.
For generations now, his nature programmes have reminded people that nature is fucking amazing. And nothing of substance and scale, all wrapped up in politics and policy and buggered about with by money, will ever be truly saved if a critical mass of people don’t think it’s fucking amazing.
Yes, I’d have loved it if he’d said something to the general viewer something like: stop eating so much fish now please. But, well, it’s kind of implied. And it would have been incongruous and perhaps undermined the wider vibe. Sir Dave’s thing is to be a politely angry granddad, not a pissed off teacher.
Post-script: urgency
I think saving our seas, and all of the rest of it, is as horrifically urgent as the next person. What I hope I’ve argued in this rather hastily written piece is that the very urgency of doing something about this stuff, needs communications that pushes the right people’s buttons in the right way at the right time. And that no one bit of comms can, should or could be expected to do it all. This is a (yuck) ‘ecosystem of change’.
Attenborough can do two things that very few other people can do, and he knows it and he’s leaning into it. First, he is the grand high prince of showing us how fucking amazing nature is, and reminding us, collectively, that being human is to give a toss about it. And secondly, when he looks down the barrel of a camera at powerful people and says - for God’s sake, you pricks, do something about this - they listen.
Or at least, I hope they do.
I couldn't agree more!