Social advertisements are short web videos, cinema or TV commercials, which aim at promoting “specific behavioural goals, for a social good” (French 2009) - they are designed to keep you from driving under the influence, help you quit smoking or make you change your diet. Most of these campaign videos aim at addressing the viewers affectively instead of relying on sober argumentation styles. In the language of social marketing handbooks: their task is overcoming the mental resistance and inactiveness of the target audience “when the weapons available to achieve it are basically just words and pictures.” (Storey 2007) The short films use cinematic staging strategies as tools, in order to engage their audience bodily and convey action stimuli - ideally persuading them to change their lives by starting to change their habits. The addressings of the viewers’ body vary greatly: Shock strategies are applied that force the audience into empathic embodied simulations of strong negative emotions. Audiovisual metaphors are developed that convey abstract and highly complex social dynamics and connections as bodily experiences. This paper aims at exploring embodied meaning making in audio-visual communication from a phenomenology informed perspective (Johnson 2007). Based on Kappelhoff’s and Müller’s (2011) approach on cinematic metaphors and Joseph R. Gusfield’s (1984) concept of “root metaphors” in public problems discourse, I propose a film analytic perspective on persuasive staging strategies that base complex meaning structures on bodily sensations. Social advertisements combine persuasion strategies of entertainment, commercial and propaganda films and through the condensed time frame, they offer the possibility to compare isolated metaphoric structures with each other. What are the fictional images that are designed to change our shared reality? And what can those images tell us about the institutions that create them and how they conceptualize their clients? References: French, Jeff (2009): The case for social marketing. In: Jeff French, Clive Blair-Stevens und Dominic McVey (Hg.): Social Marketing and Public Health. Theory and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gusfield, Joseph R. (1984): The culture of public problems. Drinking-driving and the symbolic order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, Mark (2007): The Meaning of the Body. Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kappelhoff, Hermann; Müller, Cornelia (2011): Embodied meaning construction: Multimodal metaphor and expressive movement in speech, gesture, and feature film. In: MSW 1 (2), pp. 121–153. DOI: 10.1075/msw.1.2.02kap. Storey, Richard (2008): Initiating positive behaviour. In: Judie Lannon (Hg.): How public service advertising works. Henley-on-Thames: World Advertising Research Center, pp. 13–36.