Safety videos without blood: Will they work?
About a year ago, we wrote about five safety videos produced by the Ontario, Canada, Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.
Each half-minute story addresses workplace safety topics in a variety of settings, including construction, manufacturing and retail.
They don’t sugar-coat the subject. One shows a restaurant worker’s scalded face after she slips and spills a large pot of boiling water on herself. They are disturbing — but they got more than 580,000 views on YouTube.
Now, several Canadian provinces, including Nova Scotia and Alberta, have released a new series of public service ads, “Before it’s an injury.”
These videos show workplace hazards, too, such as a bucket of water left in the middle of a hallway and a ladder with a rung that’s ready to break.
But in each one, the screen quickly cuts to black as the painful workplace injury is about to take place. In the one involving a nail sticking out of a piece of wood, you hear the sickening sound of the nail piercing flesh as a worker stands up and bumps into it. But you don’t see the incident. The last thing heard on the ad is someone saying, “Somebody get help.”
They leave more to the imagination. But they’re done in such a way that you can’t avoid thinking about what happens next.
So here’s the question: Do you need blood in safety videos for them to make an impact? Let us know what you think in the Comments Box below.
