Public Service Announcements (Psas) In Public Health Promotion

Emergent communication technology expounds the avenues through which persuasive messages are passed to potential receivers. Public health organizations, as well as advertisers, have increasingly become inclined towards the use of multimedia such as the "Web 2.0" systems, which to pass specific messages to designated audiences. One of the uses of these new technologies is in the transmission of various public service announcements (PSAs) in drug prevention awareness, and general health promotion campaigns. “PSAs are designed to induce or inform certain behaviors in specific audiences, mostly for non-commercial profit using mass media approaches" (Walther et al. 2010). Furthermore, PSAs can also be defined as short message announcements, which

Following a heuristic processing model, PSAs do not require a lot of contemplation and analysis, thus, consume minimal cognitive capacity of an individual. This is because PSAs is brief in nature, and runs for approximately 10 to 60 seconds per ad (Everett & Palmgreen, 1995). Likewise, PSA ads are also constructed in a rather straightforward manner, mostly in a single point, to avoid boredom and possible loss of concentration. Overall, these deductions imply that any individual exposed to PSA ad may have no choice but to gravitate towards conceptualizing the presented message. For example, when a short ad is portrayed on the television such as "Do Not Drink and Drive", people can easily synthesize it, without necessarily analyzing or overly contemplating on it. One can easily understand what the generator wanted to pass to the audience with a short span of time, and to a certain extent even implement it. In addition, such specificity of most PSA ads requires no segmentation of audience. Therefore, indeed PSAs is effective because they are often short and direct to the

Penetration addresses questions of how the targeted audience is informed about a specific awareness campaign. This PSAs entity looks at the functions of recall and recognition in individuals (Corrigan, 2012). For example, are individuals able to recall seeing or hearing a certain PSA ad? This emphasizes the importance of penetration abilities of PSA ads. Therefore, for evaluation purposes, it is important to look at how many people are able to recall these PSAs. For instance, a penetrative survey conducted by the Ad council to check the number of individuals who came across the PSA by Glenn Close, "Change a Mind" showed 31% of the young adult sample aged between 18 and 25 recalled the PSA from a campaign dated in March 2008, and about 28% recognized the PSA in April 2009 (Corrigan, 2012). These statistics elaborate the significance of penetration studies in reducing the effectiveness of PSAs. The fact that only a third of the targeted population recalled or recognized the ad must not be a cause of worry because the specific PSA ad largely targeted families affected by mental illness cases. In fact, other ads such as "AIDS KILLS" show relatively higher rates of penetration because the targeted audience is relatively larger. Overall, the increased penetration of PSA ads, thanks to the aid of new technologies such as the