The He Gets Us campaign has been going on now for over 4 years, and has shown up in nearly every corner of the modern media landscape, from internet videos, to ads and articles in physical print magazines, on the side of race cars, and even Super Bowl halftime show commercials, four years running (around $8-10 million a pop, no less!). Using high quality footage and photography, the campaign has set out to target the humanity of Jesus, and His relatedness to modern people who might feel otherwise.
Primarily a digital ad campaign, He Gets Us is built to counter an increasingly loud and incoherent culture where Jesus is assumed to have little place or relevance. The impetus for the campaign is stated clearly on the website: “show up in unexpected places and share a story about Jesus in a way that sparks curiosity and invites conversation.”
Those words, “curiosity” and “conversation”, are important. Even a casual glance at the website will demonstrate quickly that this isn’t a theological statement of belief, nor is it a digital version of an evangelism tract. In many ways it’s more subtle than that, and therefore less direct.
He Gets Us has drawn backlash from Christian’s who feel the messaging is a watered-down Christianity, and represents a hollow gospel, too high on tolerance and too little on real transformative power. For an evangelistic tool, one might point out that He Gets Us doesn’t mention “sin” almost anywhere on the website, a core part of the conversation for many evangelists.
Instead, He Gets Us focuses on Jesus’s compassion and wisdom. It focuses on the contradictions of the modern world, brought about by our failed solutions. One section says that “The internet promised knowledge. We have misinformation.” Another that, “Technology promised efficiency. We’ve never been more exhausted.”
Whatever its merits, criticism of He Gets Us doesn’t start or stop at its messaging. There have been many investigations into the supporters of this more than $1 billion ad campaign. Who is funding this massive enterprise, and why?
Numerous articles (here, here, and here) suggest the campaign has ulterior motives. Key among those motives are rebranding the white evangelical church to be less overtly political, and of course, harvesting the data of every person who stops by the website and engages.
The Super Bowl ads, with their massive audience impact, seem to be the most significant splashes that the campaign makes. With more than 100 million people watching, the He Gets Us campaign is looking to hit true cultural saturation.
It’s the day after the Super Bowl when writers and commentators of all stripes blast out their own takes on the merits and critiques of He Gets Us. So, why am I writing this now, 4 years late to start, and 4 months late from the last big event? Well, the campaign has shown back up in my own feeds recently, implying either a renewed push on the Campaigns end, or my algorithms have finally caught up with the zeitgeist.
I’d like to take this as an opportunity to analyze how He Gets Us uses all of the tools at their disposal to reach their aims. This is then a good o’l fashion rhetorical analysis, considering the campaign’s design, language, imagery, and intent. And we’ll engage the theology a little as it shows up (it only shows up a little).
What does “He Gets Us” mean anyway?
It’s certainly a statement, but its meaning is left ambiguous. And that’s purposeful. In a world where people describe the cultural moment in “vibes”, and offer their thoughts as “feels”, “He Gets Us” uses modern emotional language to appeal to a wide audience of people who use loose, slang-like, highly contextual language. It’s not, “Jesus understands our situation”, but rather “he gets us”.
The most important thing that He Gets Us does then is attempt to make Jesus relevant. It’s self evident that we are living in the most distant time from Jesus day, but I’d argue our time feels more distant than the 2000 years would suggest. Even 100 years ago, college students might have been expected to learn Latin, read the classics, and think about life through the lenses of ancient writers and thinkers. Modern education has tended to eschew the old classic canon for a new canon, or no canon at all, engaging students with their own interests and having them analyze that instead.
Like a fable told in a different language, young people today struggle to see any modern parallels between their lives of smart phones, social media, thoroughly modern dating conventions, etc, and the Greco-Roman world of Jesus’s day (or of the Ancient Near East before that).
He Gets Us firmly asserts that Jesus is directly relevant. His answers are relevant to your questions. You may not feel related to Him, but He is related to you. And you’d notice this if you only looked for a brief moment.
That brief moment is what He Gets Us is counting on. The unbelievable noise of our modern culture assaults the eyes and ears. What some politicians have called “muzzle velocity”, modern media moves with such enormous breadth and speed that no one can both watch it and understand it. In fact, paying attention might mean to be less informed (or more misinformed).
Visual Design
The visual design of He Gets Us is meant to cut right through the muzzle velocity. An economy of words, clean and clear imagery, and simple, high contrast colors. Does this remind you of anything?
Black, Yellow, and sometimes white, like caution tape, the design uses the simplest yet most effective colors to grab your eyes attention, in the same way a road sign might. It’s not meant to be attractive, engaging, fun, holy, or anything other than immediately eye catching. It wants people to look at it, and it does this by being visually abrupt, distinct.
In advertising color theory, red often is associated with action, hunger, and desire, while blue is associated with calm, comfort, relaxation, and trust. Black and yellow have more to do with warning or danger, like the construction site you’re barreling towards on the highway. Notice me, steer clear, pay attention, watch out!
In contrast to their color theory, the articles use potent, high quality imagery, and a provoking question. Articles have questions for titles, like “Does more ever feel like enough?”, or “Who do we overlook?” and “What is love?”, by asking questions, instead of stating facts, opinions, or beliefs, the articles invite rather than impose.
The Attention Funnel
Now that the website and campaign have your attention, they use the open hand of a question and attractive imagery to draw a potential reader further in. Titles use a sentence structure, with only the first letter capitalized. The title doesn’t want to be a title; it wants to engage you with a question and it hopes your response will be a click to read more.
Actually, it hopes you “tap” to read more, because He Gets Us is smart phone first design. Presuming you’ve just seen a commercial, or an add, the website is second screen viewing for people who are searching on the go. There’s another reason for the brief text. The website assumes you probably have the TV on in the background, or are just saw an ad while sitting in a doctor’s office and might get called away soon.
Here, like Jesus approaching a day laborer, the meeting is abrupt, spontaneous, and the window of opportunity brief. The design of the page then is smart phone first, with narrow, portrait pictures that prefer the tall and thin screen of a smart phone over the wide and short computer screens. The page stops and starts on a computer but scrolls smoothly on a phone or tablet.
The website also draws in viewers with cliché but culturally relevant ideas, like identity. One funny part of the website shows the quote “Be yourself; everyone else is taken”, then attributes the quote to, Oscar Wilde. And then reattributes the quote to Oprah Winfrey, and then Lady Gaga, and finally “some guy on the internet”. Pointing out that while the sentiment is nice, we don’t know who said it, and that “Saying ‘be yourself’ is easy. Living Authentically isn’t. Because being real has a cost.”
Rather than giving into the quest for self-identification, the website offers a series of images that tell a simple story, familiar enough for most Christians.
The series starts with an unclear muddy image, with brief text. Scrolling from left to right, the images become more clear, and the story progresses, recounting the narrative of the woman with the blood disorder from Luke 8, who clings to Jesus’s cloak in the crowd. By the end, Jesus decides her identity, she is a “daughter” who is blessed by Jesus with healing and peace.
Much of the website is like this. Ideas surface and resubmerge quickly. Sentences no more than 5 words, but with invitations to go deeper, reading longer format articles, watching videos, and considering joining an Alpha group.
The whole experience is designed like an attention funnel. The snappiness of it, the social-media-like communication style, from catchy, sugary one-liners and eye-catching photography, to relevant questions, and finally to actual substance.
But Does It Work?
I recently attended the Great Lakes Conference sessions in Celina, Ohio, hosted by Celina First Church of God, and the keynote speaker, Mark DeYmaz, argued that we now live in a time of actions, not words. Mark said that modern evangelism environment is such that, when we lead our evangelism efforts with words instead of deeds, they have little effect, or perhaps the opposite effect.
It’s hard for an ad campaign alone to be more than words, but He Gets Us does take a non-traditional approach. It’s subtler, gentler, and frankly less theologically overt. It invites more than it asserts. And there is something strategically wise about that posture in this time.
Against the detractors, I’d argue that evangelistic communication doesn’t have to contain every important message of the Bible, but perhaps a campaign funded with billions of dollars could afford to create a pipeline that runs deeper than the surface He Gets Us often sticks too. Surely there’s room for an evangelistic strategy that starts surface level and meets modern people where they are. But we’d all like it to funnel deeper. I think He Gets Us is aiming at that. I’m not confident it hits the mark.
The real question we need to ask, 4 years in, with a billion dollars down on the table is: Does this work? Because a billion dollars could produce a lot of good work. It could plant a lot of churches.
How do we even measure? If we measure the way the world does, He Gets Us has billions of views on its videos, ads, and websites. More people have viewed their videos than there are people on earth (which means people are seeing them multiple times.) At this point, your dog has probably seen a He Gets Us commercial.
Speaking about more tangible effects, as The Christian Century points out, the USA (the primary demographic for the campaign) doesn’t seem any less polarized, anxious, busy, or frustrated. Yet we have seen a small resurgence in religious belief and for those who are already religious, an increase in their dedication and attendance at worship services.
All told, we don’t know enough about the campaign’s lasting effects, and we might not for a while. The enormous amount of money spent on the campaign might seem unsustainable, but according to some donors, this is all just part of the “first phase.”
He Gets Us does provide an office like ours with some insight into what communication practices are effective and timely. And it forces us to wrestle with which methods fit our goals as we straddle both the analog and digital ages.
CGGC eNews—Vol. 20, No. 24
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