The 5 Ps of PSAs
by Bill GoodwillEditor’s note: The following article appeared in the December 2001 issue of “Communicators Guide for Federal, State, Regional and Local Communicators” published by the Federal Communicators Network. It was updated in June 2010.
When strategically planned and executed, Public Service Advertising campaigns (PSAs) can broaden the reach of your message, create greater credibility for your organization and strengthen your brand image. To make it easier to remember the key points for a well orchestrated effort, we have developed five P's of PSAs: Planning, Promotion, Placement/Packaging, Performance Assessment, and Professional competence.
Planning
Unfortunately many public education campaigns are launched without serious thought or research about campaign objectives. If your budget permits you should test your message among your target audience with focus groups, often referred to as qualitative research. For more information on the basics, go to http://www.managementhelp.org/evaluatn/focusgrp.htm. If your issue or cause is in the least bit controversial, or if there any concern how your audience will react, you should definitely employ focus groups. They will help you sharpen your message, make sure your target audience understands your key points, and keep you from possibly offending your audience.
Also consider establishing a baseline of public attitudes or behavior about your issue by employing tracking (quantitative) research. Once you have a baseline, you'll be able to measure your post-campaign results with the baseline. But be advised that real attitude and behavior change does not occur in the short term; it could be years for you to notice meaningful shifts.After you've completed the research phase of your campaign, it's time to develop your formal, written plan, which ensures you do not omit a key element. You should involve your entire public affairs staff in drafting the plan or anyone who can make a contribution to the ultimate success of the campaign. Here are some questions you should address in the planning phase of your campaign:
What are you trying to accomplish via the campaign...create general awareness, drive people to a website, call a toll-free number, raise funds, recruit volunteers?
How about your primary and secondary target audiences - where do they live, what are their ages, what are their media habits?
What are your plans to involve other stakeholders such as the media and your own internal audiences such as community partners?
What are your creative options? Will you produce the campaign elements with your internal staff or will you hire external producers? What is the cost vs. benefit for each option?
What is the campaign scope - is it TV only or will it involve other media?
What is the one single message you want your audience to remember and what is the call to action?
What's your timeline? Are there special events you can tie into to leverage your exposure? When do you plan the launch and how much time before that date to you have to start planning in order to make your deadline?
Finally, you need to establish a budget and determine who will need to approve all major components of the campaign as it is implemented. By thinking through all your options in advance, it will save from making costly mistakes and guide you through production and implementation.
Promotion
Promotion is critical to the success of a PSA campaign, but it is often overlooked. Here's are some tactics that could make a huge difference in the ultimate impact of your PSA:
Cultivate contacts at the TV networks-primarily the big four. ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. Networks. While they rarely broadcast PSAs on their networks, they may feed your PSA to their affiliate stations. See more information in the article, “Network Clearance-A Producer's Checklist.” http://www.psaresearch.com/networkclearance.html
Don't overlook the various cable networks which may be perfect for your message. For example, if you have an environmental message, the National Geographic and Discovery Channels would be a perfect match. There are hundreds of vertical networks such as these for you to consider.
Try to get media support from some of the major media associations such as the National Association of Broadcasters, the Cable Television Association or even some of the leading media networks such as Clear Channel. They may agree to let you use their logo on your PSA packaging implying endorsement and perhaps even send a blast fax or email to their member stations about your campaign.
If you're launching a new campaign that is particularly time sensitive, or has some other compelling argument, consider a pre-campaign alert. These alerts can be blast faxes, postcards, telegrams, emails or some other creative approach to the media-typically aimed at media gatekeepers. This gives them a heads-up on your new campaign and helps them schedule your PSAs, particularly if they are keyed to a special event.
Each state has its own broadcasters association which you can also enage in your campaign via pre-campaign alerts or news releases. For a complete list go to www.kab.net/OtherBroadcastAssociations/default.aspx
If you are in the Washington, DC, metro area, think about launching your kick-off press conference at the National Press Club in downtown Washington. Many of the trade publications are located close by. However, don't hold a press conference unless you have something particularly meaningful to announce, such as important survey data on your key issue.
Develop a list of trade media contacts to which a storyboard or press release can be sent. Advertising Age and Broadcasting & Cable might be interested in doing a story on your campaign. Don't forget to include magazines and trade press that might be interested in your subject such as those covering business and your particular issue, i.e. forestry or conservation. And remember the Web...use online distribution services such as PR Web for distributing your release online. https://console.prweb.com For lists of trade publications, go to Cision (formerly Bacons)’s Media http://www.bacons.com.
Remember that you are not working on your issue alone. For every mainstream cause or issue there could be a half dozen different organizations working in that space. Try to reach out to these organizations and find ways to engage them as a collaborating partner. This can help you leverage your message reach, funding, and resources.
Think about doing a special newsletter on your issue strictly for the media. We produce a newsletter called Broadcasters Cafe which is targeted to TV stations to provide the “deep sell” on a client’s issue and why it is important to media gatekeepers.
Find a special commemorative event that you can associate with your campaign. There are special events for just about every cause or concern and if you coordinate your campaign with a special event, - or create one if you can – you could generate more publicity and public attention.
Engage your community partners. Your regional or local public affairs staffs can help immeasurably in engaging local media in your campaign. Ask them to tag materials for local use, make local media visits, or give you feedback on local concerns. For for ideas on how to do this, go to www.psaresearch.com/gap.html Involving Your CommunityPartners in PSA Program Development. Placement & Packaging
Placement includes all the activities involved in getting your PSA on the air or in print – packaging, distribution, and local media contact. Here are some things to think about in this part of your plan:
Target those stations most likely to use your PSAs based on previous usage patterns, rather than size of market or audience.
Send media outlets the type of formats they most prefer, i.e. specific video tape format for TV, CD for radio and hi-res art for print. Also send them as many different spot lengths and print ad sizes as you can, because it provides media with flexibility.
Remember, that in a PSA context, local trumps national every time so if you have people working at the community level, share campaign strategy and samples with your community partners.
When it comes to packaging your campaign, you should use good direct mail techniques to send your PSAs to the media. These include full color and compelling graphics, a benefit statement, titles and lengths of all PSAs in the package and a “pull date” (when the campaign expires).
As you design your packaging materials, remember that you have less than a minute to entice a harried TV public service director to open your PSA, and keep in mind they get hundreds of PSAs each week. Including a TV storyboard in your package is very important because the public service director may not have preview equipment readily available.
Also, if you can, put all your campaign information on a single sheet of paper, avoiding overly elaborate packages. Media gatekeepers won’t read a lot of copy and if you send them fancy packages, they may think if you have that kind of money, you should be paying for the airtime.
A very important point is to provide as much flexibility as you can to media gatekeepers who are filling unsued time and space in various sizes and time blocks. For print PSAs, use CDs to send digital art of print PSAs in various sizes and in both horizontal and vertical formats. For radio & TV, you should include at least three spots - 60, 30, and 15 seconds. One of the worst mistakes producers can make is to create only a 30-second TV spot. Research shows that 60-second TV PSAs will get the most use, which allows you more time to tell your story,and they create more value.
And above all, make sure your message is relevant to the local community. Local media care most about how your national issue can build greater audience share for their station, so position and package your issue to emphasize local relevance. If you have community partners in local markets, think about tagging the PSAs with local information.
Finally, there are cost-effective ways to package your materials. You can use a shared-reel or disk approach to reach cable TV and radio rather than sending individual PSAs. You can put PSA messages aimed at different audiences, e.g. Spanish and English on the same reel or CD, instead of sending separate packages. When distributing TV PSAs, you will be paying for five minutes of video tape and about an hour for a CD. Since you are paying for that capacity, why not find creative ways to use all of it? Consider including longer-form videos, VNRs (Video News Releases) or B-roll in your release to cable systems. Many will use these longer-length pieces.
Performance Assessment
Collecting data just for the sake of creating a report, is a meaningless exercise. You've got to massage the data, look at it from various angles, and merchandise it to the fullest extent. Make sure your creative team knows what works and what doesn't. Send evaluation reports to all your stakeholders.
There are lots of different reasons for evaluating your campaign:
It provides the basis for correcting weaknesses and strengthening your campaign.
It provides data to demonstrate you are meeting organization's goals.
You can use it to calculate cost-benefit ratios.
It can help show how you've engaged the media in your issue.
An analysis of phone calls or Web site visits can demonstrate public
involvement.
Over time you can demonstrate how your campaign is achieving greater public awareness or changing attitudes.
You can use evauation data to thank the media for all the time and space they devote to your campaign.
It will help keep your community partners engaged.
And evaluation can help sustain future funding because your boss will want to know about your results.
For more specifics on how you can use evaluation data, you may want to read the article: "How You Can Use Evaluation Data To Fine-Tune Your PSA Program." www.psaresearch.com/bib4401NEW.html
Professional Competence
While it doesn’t have anything to do with campaign effectiveness per se, you should know what works and what doesn’t and the only way to know that is to study the “science” of public service advertising itself. Like any other mass communications technique, it takes time and effort to learn everything there is to know about producing PSAs that get used. Even experienced advertising agencies and consultants often overlook the basics. On the other hand, given the data that is availabel on PSAs, there's no excuse for creating PSA messages and campaigns that are off-target or in the wrong format.
Before you think about any campaign, talk to as many experienced people as you can. Call your distributor, go to workshops, call media people, talk to your advertising agency, and read about the subject. There are many articles on media and PSAs, as well as media links at: www.psaresearch.com that can help you stay abreast of the changing trends in the field.
When it comes to PSA professional competencey, what you don't know will hurt you. What you don't know will cause costly mistakes and missed opportunities, which in turn, could be worth millions of dollars of exposure for your cause. So the next time you are ready to launch a major national campaign, think about the 5 P’s of PSAs and make sure you incorporate them into your plans.
