MAKING the public more aware of improving and preserving their health and saving their lives is one of the most challenging tasks for public-relations (PR) professionals. This is because people, especially younger ones, are generally more preoccupied with having fun and enjoying life, and do not want to be reminded of sickness and death, believing that only older people need to worry about such unpleasant matters.
They also do not want to be told to take the often hard and painful steps needed—such as refraining from eating fatty foods and sweets, stopping smoking or drinking, exercising regularly and giving up many other pleasures of life—to maintain or improve their health and avoid developing heart ailments, hypertension, diabetes, cancer and other so-called dreaded diseases.
They even joke that, if a doctor advises them to do these needed lifestyle changes, all they have to do is to go to another doctor who is more permissive and who probably follows an unhealthy lifestyle himself (in line with the adages that “doctors make the worst patients” and “physician, heal thyself”).
‘Cool’ campaigns needed
THIS is why the standard PR programs of communicating the usual dry technical and scientific information to the media and the public about certain diseases, and how to fight and hopefully eradicate them, are no longer enough. PR professionals must come up with unique and cool campaigns or gimmicks to gain the public’s attention and, more important, its acceptance of and compliance with the health-care messages conveyed in the campaigns.
As has been proven time and again, to be more effective, such campaigns should involve the support and participation of celebrities, government officials and other prominent personalities who are admired, believed and imitated by the public. They should also use electronic, as well as digital and social media, which would help spread the information and messages of the campaign much faster, more widely and more inexpensively (in fact, practically free) than ever before.
ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
INTERNATIONALLY, there are two fairly recent examples of such brilliant PR ploys for generating vital health awareness that have stood out. One is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, launched by the ALS Association in the United States earlier this year to promote awareness about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and raise funds for research on the disease. ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, after the great American baseball player and Hall of Famer who was one of its best-known victims. (This, again, proves how associating a disease with a well-known figure helps bring it to the consciousness of the public.)
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge encourages nominated participants—the more famous, the better—to be filmed while a bucket of ice-cold water is poured over their heads, and, afterward, nominate others—again, better if these are celebrities like them—to do the same. The nominees have the option to decline and make a donation to the association instead.
The challenge first received significant media attention when Pete Frates, a Boston native who was diagnosed with ALS in 2012 and has subsequently done extensive advocacy and fund raising work for the ALS Association, began posting in July photos and videos of people on Twitter taking on the challenge. The campaign got a boost in publicity when, shortly after Frates’s postings went “viral,” leading US television personality Matt Lauer did the challenge on NBC’s morning show Today, of which he is the anchorman.
Support from celebrities
BEFORE long, Hollywood A-listers, like actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Aniston, pop-music icons Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake, and basketball stars LeBron James and Kevin Durant, also took up the challenge. And even here in the Philippines, popular movie and TV stars, such as Kris Aquino, Anne Curtis, Dingdong Dantes, Marian Rivera, Zoren Legaspi and Carmina Villaroel, have done the same.
But the campaign really hit the big leagues when world leaders, like former US President George W. Bush, did the challenge, and current US President Barack Obama was nominated by Ethel Kennedy to do the same. Obama declined and opted, instead, to make a personal donation to the cause. Other heads of state were also nominated to take up the challenge; some took it up, while those who did not also made personal donations, like Obama did.
The greatest proof of the campaign’s success was the fact that, from July to August, the ALS Association received $13.3 million in donations for ALS research, compared with only $1.7 million in the same period in 2013.
‘Dumb Ways to Die’
ANOTHER outstanding example of a creative and effective PR health and safety information campaign, although executed on a less grandiose scale, is the Dumb Ways to Die program, which was created by McCann Melbourne for Metro Trains in Melbourne, Australia, to promote rail safety. The main tool used in the campaign was a video of a song, also titled “Dumb Ways to Die,” being sung and showing various cartoon characters getting killed in increasingly stupid ways because of their carelessness and risky behavior.
While the campaign used traditional media, such as print, radio and TV, it was not until the video was uploaded on YouTube in November 2012 that it took off like a rocket. The campaign video went viral: It was viewed 4.7 million times within 72 hours and 28 million times within two weeks. Thus far, it has received some 88 million views!
On a personal note, the campaign came to my attention when I heard younger members of my family singing the song. I found it cute at first, but after they started singing it repeatedly I found it annoying already. But it certainly caught my attention and made me want to find out what the song was all about, which I did.
Proof is in the pudding
THE proof, as they say, is in the pudding. And the results, not just in terms of the publicity generated in both traditional and new media, but in achieving the campaign’s actual objective of promoting rail safety, are the prime evidence of the campaign’s success.
The number of “near-miss” accidents per million kilometer (which is how the Metro Trains of Melbourne measures the safety rate in their trains) has been reduced from 13.29 percent near-misses per million km in the November 2011-to-January 2012 period to 9.17 percent near-misses per million km in the November 2012-to-January 2013 period.
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and the Dumb Ways to Die campaign are the kinds of creative, out-of-the-box campaigns that PR, advertising and other communications professionals should aspire for in raising health and safety awareness among the public. And, given the right opportunity, a cause that is worthy, the availability of celebrities whose images will benefit from their supporting such causes, the electronic and social media waiting to be tapped for free, and, of course, one’s competence and creativity, there is no reason such dreams cannot be turned to reality.