Give your opinion.

Instructions

After reading the attached case, please write a paragraph as case summary and then respond to the following questions: In your opinion, are the current anti-drug ads effective? How could they be improved? Should the taxpayers be funding this campaign? Are edgier and more confrontational commercials likely to work better? Review the anti-drug ads using the link on the bottom of page 3of the case. Are such ads likely to be effective for the youth market? Is advertising the right vehicle for this purpose? If not, what alternative marketing strategies would you recommend? Should Congress provide funding for newer commercials?

Good Cause, Bad Ads?

by A. Roy

In the recent decades, the federal government has paid more than a billion dollars on advertising that was aimed at kids and youth to dissuade them from using drugs without much success. Should Congress provide more funding for such campaigns? If so, how should the new campaign is designed?

How Do You Get Your Message Across?

The U.S. Federal Government spent $1 billion of taxpayer money on advertising between 1998 and 2004 to discourage kids and teenagers aged between 12 to 18 years from using drugs (Hornik et al., 2008). However, a report commissioned by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy recently concluded that there was no evidence that the ads influenced youth and neither did marijuana use drop during that period. On the contrary, some of the 12 to 13-yearold surveyed for the study said that they were more inclined to smoke marijuana after watching these ads.

There were more than 212 TV commercials broadcasted in both English and Spanish during shows that are popular with teens (e.g. MTV, sitcoms, and professional wrestling), and featured celebrities such as Dixie Chicks and Mary J. Blige. The campaign was developed by some of the best agencies from Madison Avenue, and was considered a novel step in public health advertising because it was directly aimed at kids. Moreover, it was supposed to have created a double impact since Congress had recently enacted a law requiring TV networks, and all other media to match (for free) each ad purchase.

One 30-second spot, for example, called "Drawing," implied that hobbies such as drawing could deliver a natural high. Another one used fear appeal by showing snapshots of a model posing as a doped-up addict being wasted away to death. "No Skill" begins with some eerie bongs as background music, while a boy asks, "You gonna mess with that weed again?" as young kids shoot hoops and a stoned young boy shows up at a track meet. Finally, "Friends" takes a less direct approach by showing a birthday party with the voice of a young boy talking about how friends stick together. The ad ends with the drug agency's logo.

Quite a few additional ones were run during Super Bowl in 2003-2005. One warned that cigarettes contain the same ingredients as rat poison. Another played off their patriotism by arguing that by buying drugs they would make another terrorist attack possible. It could let America's enemies win.

What Is Wrong?

Public policy ads in general have had limited success in the past. Anti-smoking ads, and campaigns encouraging seat belt usage have been marginally successful in the past mostly with adults. The anti-drug ads, on the other hand were specifically aimed at young teens.

Many advertising experts have been critical of the use of celebrity musicians in the antidrug ad campaigns. They may have been a little too subtle with their messages. The morality aspect of the message did not come through very well. Others, like Mr. Bob Garfield of Advertising Age, feel that advertising is better equipped to make people act, but do an extremely poor job when it 2 comes to getting them not to act, or in other words, demarket the product. The anti-drug messages are faced with negating other messages that persuade young people to smoke and use drugs.

Finally, these ads may be successful in changing attitudes temporarily, but fail to change wellentrenched unhealthy habits that some young people may have already formed. They may not have any effect when some of them are faced with their impulses.

What Is Next?

The U.S. drug czar, Mr. John P. Walters, feels that the designers of the current campaign had good intentions that failed to produce results. The anti-drug campaign is up for reauthorization for another five years, and he wants the Congress to appropriate $180 million for the next fiscal year, promising to manage it more efficiently.

Changes planned by the agency include running edgier ads, pre-testing and post-testing them to test for their effectiveness (something that is commonly done by most businesses). Will Congress exceed to the demands of Office of the National Drug Control Policy? Could the money be better spent on drug treatment and educational expenditures?

Asides:

The ad campaign did not use the famous "This is the sound of your brains fried on drugs. Any questions?" commercials showing an egg in a frying pan developed by a not-for profit agency over 20 years ago. That campaign was somewhat successful in reducing drug use among teens during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Quotes:

"They didn't really seem like they had a moral to them...They seem like a joke."

--A teenager commenting on the anti-drug ads to ABC NEWS

"Advertising is not equipped to battle the moment of impulse."

--Mr. Bob Garfield, Ad Critic for Advertising Age

New Insights:

The subject of anti-drug ads is a major concern by the companies who mainly benefit from targeting children and teenagers by ad campaigns and make millions of them addict to opioid. Therefore, some political parties strongly against any action by the federal government to stop such marketing efforts. As one of the campaign slogans of President Trump in 2016 was to stop opioid addiction and prevent murdering youth by the pharmaceutical companies, the federal government has paid a special attention to this issue and spent more budget for preventing kids' brainwash. I updated the links for this case, and you can review the ads to see why some of them did not work well. I do believe that one of the reasons that these type of ad campaigns were not very successful might be that the media is not serious in fight with drugs and opioid as the companies involved have financial power and influence on the media and legislators.