Scared Campaign 2008 – description
- Using the concept of children being scared of a parent dying
- Targeted at parental conscience
- Smoking parents are encouraged to identify with the parent being portrayed on the advertisement (TV)
- Exploits parental protectiveness of children to discourage smoking
- Provides information about death rates of smoking related illness as a fear factor
- Starts off in a dark, child’s room
- Young girl’s voice but don’t see her- states basic fears and says she isn’t scared: dark, spiders, clowns, a bully from school
- Says she is scared of her mum smoking and that she will die
- Gives a number to call for help and says ‘press red’
- NHS logo and smoke free logo used
- Ran at Halloween time 2008
Evaluation in terms of approaches – Social Approach
- Referring to ideas such as conformity or obedience – may be that the advert wants to encourage autonomous behaviour
- Social identity theory – tries to make smokers the out-group
- Conformity – tries to make people NOT conform to social behaviours e.g. smoking
- Tries to get people in an autonomous state – being able to say no
Cognitive Approach
- Provides evidence that we are asked to consider
- Likely to exploit our knowledge of past events e.g. what happened to a particular person, or our understanding of facts so we can put the information in context
- Fact given at the end of the advert
- Makes you think about how your child will feel alone
Psychodynamic Approach
- Uses symbols to remind us of our unconscious fears and hopes
- Highlights the conflict between the id and the superego and strengthen the ego’s attempts to control the id
- Unconscious fears
- Playing on the ego to make the right decision
- Psychodynamic psychologist would state that the campaign would be effective because it challenges the ego to deny the id (smoker) to satisfy the superego (guilt)
Biological Approach
- Gives a fact about how smoking affects health, “Over 2,000 people die every week in the UK from smoking related diseases”
- Maternal instinct
Learning Approach
- Choice of actors and images – typical mother looking woman – will have been selected to increase the chances of the target population identifying with them
- Classical/operant conditioning – consequences of actions shown – provides vicarious reinforcement to the audience
- Social learning theory – child copies mother’s actions, will affect their health
- Role models – mother is daughter’s role model
General evaluation
- Very difficult to measure effectiveness – other variables which could affect smoking e.g. technology, other campaigns
- Campaigns often go hand in hand with a general increase in public awareness – causes improvements in health
- Preventative strategy, not curative – need to try and prevent an issue before it becomes a major problem
- Costly, but cheap compared to other strategies
How could you measure the effectiveness of the campaign?
- See whether the amount of mothers with young children who smoke has been reduced
- Problem would be gaining the figures – could do a survey but people may lie
- Try and make it objective by seeing how many people phoned the helpline given on the advert
- See whether cigarette sales go down
- See whether the number of deaths go down