Storytelling Helps a Charity Brand Break Through the Sadness Barrier

Ad Of The Week this week takes us to France, and a lovely animated short video for the Ronald McDonald Foundation. As you’d imagine, the Foundation is the charity associated with McDonalds – there are in-store collection points in restaurants and the opportunity to top up your bill with a charitable donation on the app. The work of the Ronald McDonald Foundation is all about giving the families of hospitalised children more opportunity to spend time with their kids in hospital. It does this by building housing near hospitals and letting families stay there free of charge to make visiting simple.

So how best to advertise this very worthy cause? Like most charity advertisers, the Ronald McDonald Foundation has a tricky path to walk. Charity ads are really no different from commercial ads, in that the most effective long-term ways to build a brand involve ads that make you feel positive emotions. But when you’re dealing with children in hospital, this isn’t an easy task: the topic is a naturally sad one.

In this ad, the Ronald McDonald Foundation confront this problem head-on. They intentionally raise negative emotions like fear and sadness before resolving them by the end of the film. It’s a high-risk strategy but one of the most effective for any charity ad, as while negative emotion can damage effectiveness, resolving and removing it can lead to a surge of positive response.

The method the Foundation choose in this ad is storytelling, one of the best ways to raise and resolve difficult emotions. The beautifully animated ad cleverly creates a story within a story, showing a mother reading aloud to her child over the phone. As she tells a story about a little zebra trying to find its parents, the house she’s in is blown into the air and them floats down a river, mirroring the perils Zack The Zebra is facing. Finally, the house comes to rest outside a hospital and both Zack and her own hospitalised son are reunited with their family. A voiceover explains how the visual metaphor works – the Ronald McDonald Foundation moves families to be close to their kids.

By dramatising the work it does with the narratives of the zebra and the moving house, the Ronald McDonald Foundation creates a rich, multi-layered piece of storytelling that can turn sadness and fear into emotions to be resolved. The wider sadness of the child in hospital is replaced by a sadness that can be helped by charitable giving.

This storytelling strategy pays off with a 3.5-Star Rating on Test Your Ad – a very good score for a charity ad in France, where the average TV ad is only 2.4-Stars. That score predicts good brand-building effects for the Foundation, as it works to establish an identity distinct from the wider McDonalds brand. It’s a lesson that negative emotion can be a marketer’s friend, even in charity advertising, when you use the power of storytelling to handle it properly.