Social Education

Social advertising (public service advertising) is the form of advertising that is designed to educate or motivate people to undertake socially desirable actions. Emotions are a basic component of advertising, and especially of social advertising. Emotions have a huge influence on perception, remembering, recall as well as change in attitudes and behavior. Emotions help people to remember the situations and messages in which they appeared, they evoke physiological changes as well as changes of perception (halo effect), reduce criticism and rational thinking abilities. Social ads use the wide range of emotions to influence our behavior. Rational arguments aren’t enough to change behavior or attitudes.

There are two types of social advertising:

Both forms of advertising are based on emotion. Click here for an ad from The Danish Road Safety Organization.

“Papa don’t preach” – the spiral of change

Social advertising covers serious and fundamental human problems like human suffering and moral choices. There is no recipe written on how to create an effective social campaign. Measuring a social campaign’s effectiveness is difficult and rare. Effectiveness of social advertising should be measured on three levels; motivation, engagement and recall: the higher the motivation and engagement; the better the effectiveness of advertising in terms of generating a change.

Today, social advertising shares the same problems as commercial advertising: dull sensitivity, immunity to advertising messages, scarce attention, increasing clutter and choices. The viral character of the campaign attracted millions of viewers to the campaign site and created a lot of attention from both target groups and traditional media. Changing behavior isn’t an easy task. Advertising alone, no matter how viral it is, will never change or shape human behavior and attitudes. Social advertising only makes sense when it gets people thinking and talking about the social problems. Effective social advertising needs to be able to ignite a social debate.