Effective Health Communication Campaign

Effective Health Communication Campaign

Introduction

            Every health communication campaign aims at changing how the public thinks about their health and simultaneously provide them with resources and incentives to improve them. The health communication campaigns are formulated with an ecological model. The approach takes into consideration the physiological health variable, cultural, and social factors that influence health on different levels.

The reason why the Truth Campaign succeeded with Youths

Truth exposed facts about the health and social outcomes of tobacco use and marketing strategies of the industry behind it. It exposed the daily death toll from tobacco use outside significant tobacco company’s headquarters (Farrelly, Davis, Haviland, Messeri & Healton, 2005). This exposure influenced Youths’ behavioral outcomes for tobacco use. However, The Anti-Drug Campaign appeared to be unsuccessful because they did not add anything significant from the large quantity of anti-drug messages that youth were already receiving.

Events in the Campaign that caused the Results

            Truth campaign improved their previous research by implementing a pre/post-quasi-experimental design that controlled for potential threats to validity, such as secular trends in smoking prevalence, Influence of cigarette prices, State tobacco control programs, and other factors (Farrelly, Davis, Haviland, Messeri & Healton, 2005). However, the Anti-drug Campaign lacked evidence of success because they focused on comparing youths who reported different levels of ad exposures. (Hornik, Jacobsohn, Orwin, & Kalton, 2008). Their campaign influenced more youths to engage in drug use.

Ways to strengthen the Impact of Anti-Drug Campaign

is recommended that the anti-drug campaign be provided with well-designed and well-powered evaluation studies to come with aggressive ads for the youths. They are supposed to come with new ways of exposing the harm of drug use to youths    (Hornik, Jacobsohn, Orwin, & Kalton, 2008). By using new approaches, the youth will gain interest in the anti-drug message.

Conclusion

To sum it up, the Truth campaign was significantly able to change the behavioral outcome of youths towards the use of tobacco. However, the Anti-drug campaign was not successful in changing the perception towards drug use. It is because they bring up common anti-drug messages that our youths are exposed to daily.