When I hear the words "public service announcement," I immediately imagine cheesy, homemade videos with terrible one-liners. They may have a great message promoting health in a variety of different areas, but for many years, PSA's have had a bad reputation for being over-acted and under-produced.
PSAs have been around longer than television, in fact during WWII the government used them to promote the war effort over the radio. Billboards, newspaper ads, brochures, are other media through which organization spread important announcements to the public. However, in this television age, PSAs are most often run on TV.
And, as technology has improved, so have PSAs, so that now it is their messages rather than their production, that people pay attention to. This entertainment education has helped promote messages informing the public about substance abuse, teen pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, cancer, bullying, and physical fitness that help spread knowledge to the public about healthy ways to handle each of these problems.
Yet, many of them still don't work, because people don't really want to learn anything while watching mind-numbing television. Often, rather than listening to important health information, people change the channel or mute it. But, there are some eye-catching announcements that are actually fairly effective. The best ones use conventional advertising methods such as personal stories, humor, basic statistics and catchy slogans.
For instance, in the campaign against texting while driving, personal stories and catchy slogans raise awareness of the dangers of texting and driving. In each one, a "normal person" gives their testimony of what happened when they texted and drove, who got hurt and how terrible the consequences are. These are particularly effective because I know I've been close to those same situations and have only been lucky to escape unscathed. Each short ad ends with the phrase "it can wait" which sticks in my head every time I pick up my phone while driving.
I think the best way for groups to promote healthy informational messages is actually in the television programs. For example, in a 2002 episode of Friends, the characters discussed the issues of unplanned pregnancy in the plot of the show. As it was in the dialogue itself, and not in a commercial, viewers paid much more attention to their favorite characters' plight and also learned better how to use condoms and why to practice safe sex. The Kaiser Foundation helped the RAND corporation fund a study of this episode's reception and they found that 65% of teen viewers remembered the episode, and many discussed the issues with an adult. As the analysts behind Use of Mass Media Campaigns to Change Health Behavior showed, media campaigns typically have only moderate or less evidence of benefits to the public. However, PSAs within television programs could use celebrities, humor and personal stories (of the characters viewers are invested in) to promote healthy behavior much better than statistic-spouting, over-acted commercial PSAs.
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