It was the calm tone in the Government’s Covid-19 radio ad earlier this month that prompted me to write in The Irish Times media column that the time for gentle suggestions to wear “face coverings” (whatever they are? – more confusion) – was over.
Where I wondered was the creative, effective advertising for face masks?
In the early months of the pandemic, the daily press conferences broadcast from the Department of Health did the heavy lifting in slamming the reality of coronavirus in our faces and putting us all on alert. Now we have only wordy public service announcements, and in the case of face masks, there is little clarity, or direction.
The column was written before masks were mandatory on public transport and advised in shops, but I suggested that a health measure that’s scientifically acknowledged to work – and that many people were already adopting anyway – doesn’t have to be a legal obligation to be clearly explained, because if the benefits are widely understood, behavioural change typically follows. And advertising can do that.
In the early 1980s, Aids prevention information in the US took the form of basic public service messages, wordy abstinence-promoting bulletins that were largely ignored. By 1987 it was brutally clear the messaging wasn’t working. In that year 48,000 people in the US died from HIV/Aids – a figure that prompted public panic and a rethink about the communication.
Condoms were then understood to help halt the spread of the virus and general consumer-focused campaigns for condom brands soon sprung up – not without controversy on moral grounds – but where they were treated like just another product. They were advertised on TV and in print with glossy photographs and clever slogans, stressing the health rationale and dealing with perceived problems around “comfort” and “not liking them”. In the first year of widespread condom advertising, sales in the US rose by 40 per cent.