I'm gonna start doing watch parties of the popular anime series Uma Musume starting six weeks from now. Similar to my vow to create land acknowledgement videos whenever I show for-profit TV/film productions created on Indigenous land, I also want to make a short video before showings of Uma Musume that state in clear terms that the show was created to promote horse betting.
My current script looks like this:
Tonight's feature presentation has financial ties with and seeks to normalize horse racing, a highly exploitative industry predicated on the physical and mental abuse of animals. Horse racing, as well as this cartoon's tie-in video game, finances itself by vampirizing people's wallets through gambling: corporations exploiting human psychology to create a highly addictive waste of your time and money.
DON'T BE A SUCKER! Don't buy gachas! Don't bet on horses! Don't give your money to animal abusers! Your money is better spent on ending the cruel practice of horse racing! The only acceptable amount of money to spend on gambling is zero! Treatments for problem gambling are effective!
Which takes about 32 seconds for me to read out loud.
This script will be set to an instrumental of The Animals' "The House of The Rising Sun", cliché as that song may be; and the visuals may include statistics related to horse racing and/or gambling, and, more importantly, links and QR codes to organizations fighting to end horse racing, and support for overcoming gambling addictions.
And this is the main point where I'd like assistance:
- What should I link to, specifically? Especially bearing in mind that these videos will be aimed at an international audience.
- What sorts of statistics should I include?
- Are there ways the script can be improved? The balance of focus on animal abuse vis-a-vis gambling addiction? More focus on the "normalization" aspect of the show, or that pirating it still contributes to its value as a commodity? The length or brevity?
None of this is my zone so I was kind of skeptical of your PSA. So as I always do I read the wikipedia which is one of the least balanced Wikipedia articles ever. It is entirely positive without even a fake controlled opposition type of "controversies" section.
You would probably know better but is it underselling with language like ”has financial ties with"? It seems to me that this must have been created by and for this Japan Racing?
If this Wikipedia page is to be at all believed, this show is a very effective advertisement and propaganda vehicle. There must be information available about the effect this has had on income and popularity of this industry.
This isn't really answering your question because I don't know what are the effective ways to inoculate audience against what is apparently a strong way to convince them to participate in gambling, which is already really compelling to many. The general idea of cognitive inoculation is to describe the ways you might be decieved or swayed so that when it shows up the audience is prepared with an internal counterargument, making the propaganda seem silly and uncompelling. So I guess it depends on what is so alluring about the world of retired horse relationships or whatever..?
I did feel like "financial ties" is underselling the relationship, but I couldn't really think of a better way to put it in as few words as possible. The anime was created most immediately to promote a video game created by Cygames, a giant of "I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling" type mobile games in its own right. So, Uma Musume is not really a work "by" the Japan Racing Association — it was Cygames that approached the horses' owners first, not the other way around — but Uma Musume is nonetheless very much "for" the horse racing industry, which is to say there's a reason why the industry agreed to the partnership so readily: the use of real racehorses' likenesses is a powerful form of "cross-promotion", if we can call it that, to the point where a coworker of mine was genuinely sad about Haru Urara's passing — a horse he never would've heard of without Uma Musume and the memes it has spawned.
I mean if an advertising company cold calls a business with a pitch for an ad campaign, its still funded by the business. No matter who's idea it was originally. Since the plots involve real horses and such, I assume there had to have been collaboration from the start due to trademarks and such. It is unlikely this game company just happened to create a perfect marketing tool without any significant input from the beneficiaries. Especially as you say this company is functionally not only in gaming but also gambling.
Gambling being one of the most infamously mobbed-up industries, how likely is it that these two businesses don't have intertwined relationships where they work together on things? Serendipity unlikely. There has to be journalism around this?
Anyways that all just me reacting to the concept in general and not really giving much towards the question.
Idk what is your audience/venue, if it would fly at all, but maybe you could try to do some kind of "equal time" policy like also showing videos that exhibit the contrary position. Before, after, alternating, insert "anti-commercial breaks" etc. Of course fewer people will watch them, maybe very few, and it's extra work to find and review.
At first I was thinking of the situation like analogous to the many, many TV shows that exist to promote toys, games or other products. But more like a TV show that exists to promote cigarettes. Thinking of other shows that really strongly advocate for a certain position, what could you say at the outset to minimize it? Like what could you say before the X Files to convince people to trust the government, it's fine, nothing is being hidden, and it's really quite unlikely that any aliens could get here?
Yes, very well said.
My venue is blorp.bot.nu (see !blorp@hexbear.net and !blorptube_on_grad@lemmygrad.ml) and my audience is by and large going to be fellow Hexbear users. When I've done similar "anti-commercials" in the past with other things I've shown, people have responded very well to them. Not that that was an "equal time" policy, though, it was generally shorter videos.
Like The Twilight Zone?
actually I was watching some twilight zone a while ago. I can't specifically recall anyone smoking, but probably they did. I did get that old school feeling that it was selling white heterosexuality.
In the episodes themselves, smoking isn't markedly prominent in my experience, but Rod Serling himself is smoking pretty much every time you see him in the show, and I can recall at least one episode I saw where he starts going on and on about promoting the cigarette brand he's smoking. I'm talking out of my butt but I think there were probably a lot more of those cigarette sponsor segments in the original broadcast of the show which have been removed in rebroadcasts or VODs.
Here's a compilation of Rod Serling cigarette ads from The Twilight Zone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41UqyXqXMpY