As I write this, there’s a video advert knocking about on the web.

It’s professionally put together.

It’s effective.

and

It’s purely designed to invoke fear and spread panic about your money.

The video in question is from a ‘leading financial magazine’ and uses every emotional trick in the book to get you to a stage where you purchase a subscription to the magazine which claims to know “the steps you need to take to avoid financial collapse”.

Whilst there are sections of the press which do a brilliant job in talking about the facts and helping you make uninformed (and more importantly slightly more logical) decisions there are a few newspapers and magazines who have decided not to take this approach.

Which brings me back to this video..

The video talks about ‘The End of Britain’ and purports to give you ways to ‘protect yourself from the coming storm’.

It uses statistics to bamboozle, making huge assumptions based on these statistics to jump to conclusions.

It also talks about the times in this particular magazines history when they made predictions which turned out to be correct failing to mention any single time when a prediction might have actually not occurred.

The video’s production is quite interesting too…

The music they more Jaws than Panorama.

It’s dialogue is more “28 days later” than Newsnight,

and

it does the job of making you scared about your money very well.

How do I know? It scared me!

I like to think that I’m pretty good at being rational (after all I write about this all the time).

The reality is that I’m as emotionally driven as the next person.

However as I’ve understood  more about this subject it’s allowed me to, every now and again, take a step back from my emotions and try to put things into a degree of logical perspective.

However “my chimp” is still in control the majority of the time and when something is engineered effectively to engage this part of my brain….odd’s are it will!

So, the video made me scared! I started thinking about my own money and what I needed to do. I even thought about subscribing to the magazine to see what insights they had.

and then the rational part of my brain seemed to kick in. This got me thinking slightly differently about what I’d just watched and I started asking myself some questions?

* What motivation is behind producing this video? Is it to sell more magazines or genuinely provide information designed to help? I decided it was the first one.

* If the video was designed to be an honest and balanced representation of facts would it have taken narative inspiration from “The Shining”? I decided it probably wouldn’t.

and

* Did the team who made this video have a crystal ball? I decided it was unlikely!

So, instead of reacting. Instead of making instantly emotional decisions about my money. I took a step back. Asked myself some questions, and instead of being driven by fear I was hopefully more rational and logical in my decision making approach.

So, let me ask you a few questions….

Was your last financial decisions based on fear? Did this fear come from reading the papers, or seeing something scary online? or was it based on thinking about what you truly want from your life and focusing on how you achieve it?