1. PLANNING HEALTH
PROMOTION CAMPAIGNS
COM- 126

2. Truth Campaign (p. 342)
 Started in the late 1990s to prevent teen
smoking
 Analysts claim Truth has been a success
because the creators take time to
understand & engage with the target
audience
 In other words, the campaign honors the
rebellious disposition of teenagers,
something previous campaigns failed to
account for
 Quote on p. 343 – “We’re not here to blow
sunshine…We’re not here to preach. We’re
here to make sure everyone gets
unfiltered...facts about...”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAhAz7JU0dg

3. Four Fundamental Principles
Know your
audience
Take action
when words
aren’t
enough
Establish
goals and
measure
success
Encourage
social support
for healthy
behaviors

4. Planning A Health Campaign
1. Defining the situation and potential benefits
2. Analyzing and segmenting the audience
3. Establishing campaign goals and objectives
4. Selecting channels of communication
5. Designing campaign messages
6. Piloting and implementing the campaign
7. Evaluating and maintaining the campaign

5. Background on Health Campaigns
 Early campaigns designed with confidence that
humans want nothing so much as their health and
longevity
 If behavior is unhealthy, stop doing it
 Go to great lengths to pursue health-enhancing
outcomes
 Thus, persuasion was not needed, only reliable
information
 Motivation assumed to already be there
 If so, persuasion is a mute point
 Modifying behaviors is not this simple

6. Motivations

7. Step 1 (p. 347)
Benefits What are the benefits your efforts will achieve?
What is research saying?
Are there some who would not benefit?
Current
situation
Assess the current situation – How many people currently
participate in recommended behavior?
Tap into various sources for information
Diverse
motivations
Health concerns not only motivation
Why perform a behavior?
Different audiences have different reasons

8. Step 2 (p. 348)
 Audience analysis is
key
 Data collection
 Gather various
information via
different methods to
know your audience
 Don’t rule out existing
data with what is
already tangible to
learn about your
audience’s beliefs,
values, and habits
 Interviews
 Questionnaires
 Focus groups
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMwx
WHaZUro (Classic Egg Smashing PSA)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SfUW
m33EM8 (Milk Ad – Palm Oil)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ljxDjw
DjU (Texting & Driving)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QT8Bh
Zp4cs (Teen Pregnancy)

9. Step 2 Approaches
Look at all your data and find the best target group
Once you have target, fill in the blank about this target;
feelings, attitudes, perceived benefits, media habits;
imagine target as a person
Audiences carry with them some general characteristics that
will help you to understand target better
Young audiences: look at developmental stages and see
where your population falls; some predictive behaviors and
thought patterns
Personal fable: Adolescents think they are unlike others
and others do not understand them

10. Sensation Seeking Behaviors
 Activation model for information exposure
 Persuasive messages will be most effective
when they stimulate an optimal amount of
arousal in the reader/viewer; “optimal” not
the same for all
 Sensation-seekers: people who enjoy new and
intense experiences; More impulsive
 “The little prick” advertisement for HIV
testing
 More young adults/adolescents
 Risk (or perhaps danger) appeals to them
 Sometimes hard to target this audience without
offending others

11. Informing The Audience
Underinformed audiences
Many audiences who are underinformed may also
unfortunately not receive campaign information
Need greater concerted efforts to reach them
Dissemination is critical
Use of mass media more associated with being
informed; social capital
Benefits possible when members of community build
positive social connections and mutual sense of trust

12. Step 3
 What do you want to achieve with campaign?
 Be clear
 e.g., For people to understand the risks of smoking,
depression, texting & driving, etc.
 What do you want people to start/stop/continue
doing?
 How will you measure success and determine
accountability?

13. How To Motivate Individuals To Attend To Health Messages
Use Novel Messages, Settings, And Media;
Consider Discrepant And Unexpected Messages, Settings, And Media;
Instruct The Audience To Pay Attention To The Message;
Construct Messages In A Denotatively Specific Manner; Choose Spatially
Immediate Demonstratives;
Use Temporally Immediate Speech;
Avoid Qualifiers; Use Probabilities Associated With Specific Outcomes Of
Certain Behaviors

14. Step 4 (p. 359)
 Channel: means of
communicating information
directly or indirectly
 What does your audience
most likely use and trust?
 Channel characteristics
 Reach
 Number of people exposed
 Specificity
 How accurately message can be
targeted to specific group
 Impact
 How persuasive is the message?
Narrowcasting
Tailored to reach
specific people
Doctor visit
Tailored messages
People ask for or need
specific things; might
complete a survey for
information
List of specific foods
for lowering
cholesterol

15. Diffusion of Innovations (p. 361)
 New information is filtered, passed
along through the community
 It seeks to explain how information is
shared in social communities
 Diffusion – Process of communication
 Innovation – Idea perceived as new by
individual(s)
 Time: How much time is required to
expect changes in behaviors?
 Individual will seek information from
various sources
 Rate of Adoption – How quickly will
people adopt the innovation?
 Consideration of advantages, ease of
use, compatibility (with goals)

16. Elaboration Likelihood Model
 When we are highly involved with the message, we are more likely
to think critically about the information being presented
 Central & Peripheral Routes
 We remember high-involvement messages longer than others
and are more likely to act upon them
 People who use high-involvement channels are usually better
informed about health than those using low-involvement
channels
Motivation Involvement

17. ELM
CentralPeripheral
Processing Route (Ability/Motivation)
Involvement

18. ELM & Motivation
Motivation Involvement
Route to
Take?
“There are stable individual differences
in intrinsic motivation to engage in
cognitive endevours” (Petty, Cacioppo,
Kao, & Rodriguez, 1986, p. 1032).

19. Designing The Message
Choose a Voice for Your Campaign
 Imagine target audience as one
“person”
 What is his/her personality and mood?
 Friendly or authoritarian?
 Logical or emotional?
 Will audience respond to this person?
 Look for voice that audience will trust

20. Designing The Message
 Does message rely on logic or
emotion? Often, if not always, it will
be blend both of these…
 Does message promote positive
rewards or negative rewards?
 Is the theme confidence, self esteem,
fear, etc. ?
 Is message novel or shocking?
 Novel – new; shocking – intense or
improper

21. Designing The Message
 Evaluation
 Conduct pretest and posttest
 Study behavior changes
 Look at what doesn’t happen
ie: drug use
 Maintenance
 People more likely to continue
behavior when benefits are fully
understood

22. Chapter 14
COM 126
Implementing Health Campaigns

23. Health Belief Model
 The level of their personal
susceptibility
 Are the adverse effects
considerable?
 Are the benefits worthwhile?
 Are the costs justifiable?
 Have they experienced a
compelling warning or alluring
incentive?
The HBM contains
several constructs that
are hypothesized to
predict why people
engage in prevention,
screening, and/or
controlling health
conditions.

24. TRA/TPB
 People make decisions based
on:
 How strongly they believe
behavior will lead to positive
outcome
 The perceived social
implications of behavior
 Know beliefs, add salient
beliefs, change current belief
evaluation/strength
 Change normative belief (e.g.
perceived expectations of an
attitudes), change motivation
to comply
Attitudes toward a specific
action
What will happen if I
engage in this
behavior?
Is this outcome
desirable or
undesirable
Subjective norms regarding
that action
Normative beliefs:
others expectations
Motivation to comply:
do I want to do what
they tell me? How
much? Why?

25. TRA TPB
Demographic
Attitude Toward
Target
Personality
Other Individual
Differences

26. TTM Theory (p. 370)
Transtheoretical Model
Says people change in 5 stages
1. Precontemplation- not aware of problem
2. Contemplation- thinking about problem
3. Preparation- deciding to take action
4. Action- making a change
5. Maintenance –Sticking to change for 6 months +

27. TTM Model Cont. (pp. 370-371)
 People react differently to health promotion efforts
depending on their current stage
 Need to gauge and plan accordingly with
campaign
 Wise to seek incremental changes rather than
radical changes
 People will not automatically overhaul behavior
with every piece of information

28. Critical Cultural Approach (p. 372)
Cognitive models share common focus: Treat health
as product of choices we make as individuals
 Acknowledge choices influenced by range of
factors
 Critical-cultural approach (Dutta): proposed that
health is not merely the result of individual choices,
but intertwined with issues of culture, power,
control, identity, and social consciousness
 More pervasive than any one individual
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chXsLtHqf
dM

29. EPPM
 Extended Parallel Process Model (Witte)
 If people are anxious they avoid subject
 People evaluate threatening message (first) to
determine if they are personally at risk and (second)
to judge whether they can prevent a harmful
outcome
 If they perceive a risk, but feel they can’t avoid bad
outcome, they will soothe their anxiety by avoiding the
issue

30. EPPM (p. 372)
 Specificity – Variables problematic
 Predictive Power  Other theories lacked this
 Success v. Failure  No prediction when
campaigns could succeed or fail
 Complex!
 It started getting kids in H.S. trying to brush teeth!
 Witte (1992) came along and tried to investigate
why health campaigns succeeded or failed…

31. Pilot The Campaign
 Piloting: selecting members from the target
audience to review campaign and comment on
materials
 Written messages easy to read
and understand?
 Recorded messages easy to understand?
 Relevant and important?
 Appealing?
 Spokesperson effective?
 Information controversial or offensive?

32. Evaluate & Maintain
 Requires campaign managers to
evaluate success of project,
help community members
maintain any positive changes
made, and refine and develop
future campaign messages
 Evaluation
 Pretest-posttest design
 Survey people before and after
campaign for attitude, knowledge,
and action change
 Study actual behavior changes
 Sometimes success occurs by what
does not happen over time
Maintenance
• Continued
encouragement and
skills training
• People need continued
education
Encouragement,
incentives, and
continued skills training
can help overcome
setback that may occur