Are Video Calls To Action Overrated?
One of the core tenets of both advocacy and marketing is to provide people with a clear “call to action.” Providing information is not enough, the theory goes, and people need a specific nudge in right direction. Results from a recent small-scale study by Mercy for Animals (MFA) seem to question the importance of a call to action for vegetarian and vegan outreach videos.
Video is currently one of the most popular methods of veg*n outreach. A quick look at the Faunalytics library reveals a number of articles studying videos as a form of advocacy. Most recently, we looked at another MFA study of the effectiveness of videos, though the results were inconclusive. The newer study looked specifically at providing different calls to action. While almost all MFA videos end with an on-screen call to action, the effectiveness of those calls has not been studied closely.
The idea that a particular call to action may have a different effect on viewers is an important one to consider. For this study, MFA recruited over 2,000 participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. They created 12 different videos, one without a call to action as a control and three versions of each other video with the following call to action options: 1) Please leave animals off of your plate, 2) Please cut out or cut back on animal products, and 3) Please choose vegan. After viewing, participants were asked how they felt, and a day later, participants were sent a second survey measuring interest in changing their diet.
Like the previous MFA video study, the results are interesting but inconclusive. Researchers found that “participants who were exposed to all three calls to action were slightly more likely” to say they would reduce meat consumption. However, they note that the “differences were not statistically significant” and “the three calls to action did not produce significantly different results.” They note that “Please leave animals off your plate” and “Please cut out or cut back on animals products” had “similar and larger effect sizes,” but caution again that they were not statistically significant.
Also similar to the previous MFA video study, this research is not meant to be a final word, but rather a starting point for deeper study. The use of a call to action is an important consideration in all animal advocacy materials and the specific choice of actions may still have an effect on respondents. This study should encourage all animal advocates to be more cognizant of the importance of these aspects of their advocacy and to fully test message and materials.