I’m never far from my mobile phone. Well, it would be more accurate to say that my mobile phone is another limb; constantly attached to me. Like everyone else, I can at times thoughtlessly ignore the people I’m with in favour of my phone.
That’s why I’m proud to have been involved in the creation of a new word and a global movement that captures this uniquely 21st century phenomenon and makes people think that it might be time to – occasionally – put the phone away. Stop phubbing, people.
I’m thinking about this again now because I spent some time sharing the journey towards the “Phubbing” campaign at the ADMA AC&E Awards Showcase in Melbourne last week as one of the winners.
Creating “Phubbing” for Macquarie Dictionary reminded us of a number of lessons about advertising. The most important thing was that you don’t need a huge budget to create a global movement.
What you need is a core behavioural truth that people instantly identify with and in this case, a truth that the whole world could identify with – and that proved incredibly powerful. You can never go wrong when you tap into the truth.
The aim of the campaign was to remind people of the relevancy of dictionaries at a time when such things are being left behind. But we had minimal budget to achieve that.
So we assembled some of Australia’s greatest wordsmiths and experts and created a word that corresponded to an as-yet-unnamed real problem – poor smartphone manners. Snubbing the person in front of you in favour of your phone – phubbing.
The campaign attracted the attention of more than 300 million people around the world. It was discussed in over 180 countries via social media. Over 750 news outlets in 50 countries covered the campaign, earning an astounding 435 million PR impressions while reaching 3.6 million Australians.
By introducing the campaign via a movement (“Stop Phubbing”) we were able to create a groundswell of discussion, interest and even outrage at the habit. Some anti-phubbing converts even went as far as to make 10-minute films while someone even wrote a book about phubbing and other new words.
Not since the industrial revolution have so many words been added to the English language and we’ve got the tech revolution to thank for that. So pick up a dictionary, kick back on a couch and marvel at the ever-changing nature of language.
Pat Baron
ECD
McCann Melbourne
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