Assignment: Public Health Advertising Assignment: Public Health Advertising

Assignment: Public Health Advertising

Assignment: Public Health Advertising

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Emotions can be powerful motivators. Advertisers know this and appeal to our emotions—especially fear—in advertising messages as a tactic to motivate their target audience into behaving in a certain way.

For this assignment, find and view three types of advertising messages:

•Political advertising.

•Public health advertising.

•Commercial advertising.

Try to view more than one example of each type of advertising. Make notes about the overall message and tone. To make this activity more time efficient, you may consider watching ads on YouTube. Search for the type of ad, and then use the filter to narrow your results. For example, you can narrow the political ads results by filtering for ads from this year.

In addition, look for scholarly research articles that examine how advertising appeals to our emotions, particularly our fears.

After watching the ads and conducting research, complete the following:

•Describe the overall tone of each type of ad. What emotion is the ad trying to arouse?

•Describe the behavior the ad is seeking to encourage.

•Apply one theory or concept to explain why appealing to emotions such as fear can be highly effective.

•Explain the social conditions that foster fearfulness.

•Explain how individual perceptions and experiences perpetuate fearfulness.

Assignment requirements:

•Your completed assignment should be 3–4 pages in length, excluding title page and reference page.

•Use references from at least two scholarly resources.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on traditional public health advertisements annually.^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7} In theory, public health advertising can save money and lives by encouraging behaviors that prevent disease before it happens.⁸ While the objective of advertising investments (e.g., encouraging people to quit smoking) differs from those of private advertisers (encouraging people to purchase a good or service), the central idea is the same: to change behaviors.

Before online advertising, it was only possible to empirically test public health campaigns by randomizing small numbers of participants and to examine a few outcome measures.^1,2 This makes it difficult to test to whom different forms of advertisement are best targeted.^3,4,5,6

Humans vary greatly with respect to both their biology and their beliefs. Medical researchers use predictive analytics to mine databases of genetic information in order to target treatments to individuals who are more likely to respond to them. Similarly, private advertisers use predictive analytics to mine multiple sources of sociodemographic and behavioral