Smoking, drinking, texting: public service advertising can change bad habits

How influenced are you by public sector advertising? According to a study commissioned by media agency Mediavest from its sister company Ignite Research, 65 per cent of people admit to having changed their behaviour due to public sector advertising campaigns.

Half of the 1,000-plus respondents claimed they had stopped using their mobile phone in the car, while 38 per cent said they had adopted healthier diets.

When researchers gave survey participants a list of particular issues, they found 61 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that the government should run public advertising campaigns on drug abuse, while messages on healthy eating and safe driving were supported by 60 per cent. An eye-watering 58 per cent said they supported campaigns on social welfare fraud.

The most effective public-sector campaigns are usually the ones that remind people what they already know they should be doing – drive safely, eat more healthy food and, if they smoke, stop, says Dave Griffin, a director of Mediavest, which counts the Road Safety Authority (RSA) among its clients.

“The ones that came out well were related to food and safety where people were confident there wasn’t another agenda,” he says, adding that campaigns by banks and Irish Water weren’t as influential because the public were starting from a position of hostility when they saw the ads.

“The mobile phone one was interesting because instead of having social change over multiple years, it was a much quicker reaction,” notes Griffin.

Reported behavioural changes are “obviously a combination” of the RSA’s advertising campaigns on the dangers of using phones while behind the wheel and other sources of information alerting drivers to the laws on dangerous driving.

New legislation banning drivers from sending an SMS message from behind the wheel came into effect in May 2014 (although plans to extend this law to other messaging apps and internet use have been shelved for the moment).

Texting

The 2014 change was backed by the RSA TV campaign “Anatomy of a Split Second”, which won a gold award in the public-sector category at the Global Epica Awards ceremony in Berlin.

The ad, produced by the RSA's creative agency Irish International and directed by Martin Stirling, puts a split second under the microscope and shows how even a momentary distraction of a text can result in a devastating collision. The win meant the RSA received €50,000 worth of free airtime on the Euronews channel.

Another public sector campaign, the HSE’s Quit Smoking campaign, has won several awards for effectiveness from the Institute of Advertising Practitioners of Ireland’s ADFX awards.

Griffin says Mediavest commissioned the survey on public sector advertising because it wanted to show clients and potential clients that the campaigns worked.

Ads that run in “traditional” media still tend to trump digital ads for trustworthiness, the study indicated. “Even though online has come up as a trustworthy source, it still isn’t as high as newspapers, television or radio,” says Griffin.

Digital

That said, when public-sector campaigns wish to target a younger audience in particular, digital advertising comes into its own. One example is the HSE’s mental health campaign Little Things, which included native advertising on TheJournal.ie, particularly around bank holidays.

Radio is particularly strong in the Irish market, notes Griffin, who cites an information campaign by the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, which, as it was targeting women of an older generation, was strongly weighted towards radio.

Another campaign aimed at people in financial trouble who were in need of an insolvency practitioner used local press and radio and some online sites – but not finance ones – to get its message across. This, says Griffin, was because the target group was believed to have “switched off from the mainstream press”.