My PSA was created for the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, which helps people with mental problems, including the compulsive buying behavior, to face the issue of accumulated debts.

Title: Like A Bucket of Cold Water

Logline: A young girl addicted to shopping spends all her money in buying clothes. She realizes she can’t pay her apartment rent and she’s therefore kicked out of the apartment by the landlord.

Treatment: The PSA begins with some flash shot of quotes from real stories of women that suffered of shopping addiction and decided to ask for help. After those quotes, the main character is introduced: a young girl, still in her bedroom. As she wakes up, the first thing she does is to open shopping apps on her phone and buy clothes. Later in the morning, while she’s having breakfast, she receives a message from the landlord of her apartment saying that the time she had to complete her payment for the apartment has finished: she is desperate and starts crying.

Through a flashback and the use of voice over, she starts narrating how she became shopping addicted without realizing it, because of the facility of buying online and the many discount offers that attracted her. She keeps buying in stores, but also online, through the many shopping apps she has on her phone that continuously advertise clothes and remind her about promotions and last time opportunities. Until one day the landlord of the young girl’s house, a woman in her middle-age, shows up at the house requesting for the complete apartment rent, but the young girl doesn’t have the total amount of money because she had spent everything on clothing. They start fighting until the woman gives her an ultimatum of a week to finish paying the rent; this is the moment when the young girl realizes the addiction has become so profound that she can’t stop buying.

The flashback ends with this last scene. Back to the present-day time of the first scene, when the young girl is having breakfasts and receives that message from the landlord, she is so desperate that she comes at the conclusion that the only thing she can do to end this vicious cycle is to ask for help.

Take-home message: The Call to Action of this PSA is to reach out for help as soon as one realizes to have become addicted to buying and to have accumulated debts.