STATE SPENDING BIG BUCKS TO TELL US WHAT TO DO

AD CAMPAIGNS TARGET SEX, DRUGS, TOBACCO

SACRAMENTO - There is a joke among California health officials that someone
should invent a five-sided bus, so they can have more room for advertising.

Using radio, TV and newspaper ads, buses and bus shelters, carefully placed
messages on TV sitcoms, slick brochures, Web sites, toll-free hot lines,
educational materials and highly produced videos, the government is no
longer pushing war bonds and polio shots.

It's selling behavior.

More than ever before, the government wants to change the way you think.
Public officials are spending billions on new campaigns, even buying
expensive ads on prime-time TV. It's called social marketing - part
behavioral science, part propaganda, part Madison Avenue - and it has become
the most popular political antidote to society's many shortfalls.

Don't drink. Don't smoke. Breast-feed your child. Car pool. Buckle your seat
belt. Don't use methamphetamines. If you do, don't dump your meth chemicals
in the woods. Be a good daddy. Be a good mommy. Don't beat your wife. Don't
beat your lesbian lover. Listen to your kids. Talk to your kids. Eat your
vegetables. Don't fight on the playground. Mentor someone. Don't have sex.
If you have sex, use a condom. And for darn sake, RECYCLE!

These are just some of the recent California campaigns, funded by state
taxpayers and a cigarette surcharge, at a cost of about $220million since
1997. California has spent $634million in the past decade alone to combat
tobacco use.

Now, an unprecedented amount of money is about to be unleashed in the
largest behavior-changing campaigns in American history. It's all thanks to
the recent mega-settlement with tobacco companies and a Clinton
administration push to "unsell" drug use to children.

Billions in new campaigns

The anti-drug and anti-tobacco campaigns have $2.45 billion budgeted for
advertising over the next five years. Many Madison Avenue firms have created
social marketing divisions to reap the government contracts.

"The kinds of budgets we're looking at today are unheard of. In the past, it
was nothing like this," said Ed Maibach, social marketing director for
Porter Novelli, a pioneer in the field and partner with the White House to
help produce the federal, $195 million-a-year anti-drug campaign.

For the first time, the government is actually purchasing pricey prime-time
TV ad space, when for decades it simply counted on the benevolence of
networks to run the so-called PSAs - public service ads - when they could.
Predictably, most ads have been buried in late night slots.

Few people question the underlying motives for these campaigns. Society
benefits when people drive sober, avoid cigarettes, have safe sex, get a
prostate cancer test and use their seat belt. (In New York City, the
disembodied voices of celebrities like Joan Rivers greet taxi passengers,
reminding them to buckle up.)

But political whims often create problems for these well-intentioned
campaigns. A new administration can bring a new emphasis and different moral
direction, cutting off a program mid-campaign when it needed years to
develop and change entrenched attitudes.

Millions of dollars in anti-smoking TV ads were shelved by former Gov. Pete
Wilson because he didn't want to vilify a legal business, the tobacco
industry, even though experts told him that it was the most effective way to
reach teens.

About the time he decided to run for president in 1995, Wilson also dropped
his Education Now, Babies Later campaign after $5million had been spent.
Critics accused Wilson of dropping the ads because it was considered "too
liberal," but he said the program wasn't working.

Now Gov. Davis must decide whether to continue another Wilson- inspired
campaign that preaches sexual abstinence, mentoring and good fathering
skills. The cost between 1997 and June 1999: $28.7 million.

One prominent ad in the campaign features a teenage voice, an actress,
talking about having a baby when she was 15. The point is not to preach, but
to explain how having a baby early destroys the most important thing to
teenagers: their social life.

"Yeah, I love my baby," she says, "but I sure wish I waited longer to have
him."

Davis said recently he likes the subjects of the Partnership for Responsible
Parenting, but he may start his own campaign on another topic - reviving a
World War II ethic of public service. Ad agencies and the state Department
of Health Services are waiting to see what happens with the abstinence ads
begun by Wilson.

The number of California teenagers giving birth has declined slowly in the
late-1990s. More women are getting prenatal care, particularly Latinas. But
the state still has one of the highest birth rates in the nation among
teenagers, and these young women are less likely to get prenatal care.

"I think we've been effective already, but this isn't something that can
happen overnight," said Kelly Coplin with Runyon Saltzman & Einhorn, which
helped produce the Partnership ads.

Whether the program stays or goes, one thing is inevitable: Elected
officials will turn to the airwaves and advertising to sell their message.
Davis, for example, recently won legislative approval for a $4million ad
campaign to tell parents to read to their children.

"The bottom line is it's all about politics," said Bob Belinoff, a sort of
social marketing guru from New Mexico who has a Web site on the subject,
www.mkt4change.com. "The people who are putting this stuff on the air are
all politicians elected because of television. So it's only natural that
they would think they could unsell sex with an ad."

There are dozens of tiny campaigns that are so low-budget or so obscure that
most ordinary citizens never hear about them. They seem to come and go
almost on a whim, like a recent U.S. State Department ad reminding people
they need to get a passport before traveling overseas. Who knew?

The California Department of Health Services helped contribute last summer
to a brief, $31,000 BART and Muni advertising campaign with the message: "I
never thought a woman could rape another woman. The anti-violence campaign
prompted a few calls to local agencies, a few news stories.

When it comes to the major campaigns, hundreds of millions of dollars are
targeting one audience: Those under 18. They're the hardest group to
manipulate because they have a sophisticated knowledge of the media and are
more willing to submit to peer pressure.

"We're not trying to get people to buy a product, we're trying to change
attitudes," said Alan Levitt, director of the White House's $1billion youth
anti-drug campaign.

Part of the effort includes working with Hollywood producers and writers,
particularly those at the Warner Bros. TV network, to get messages inserted
into such teen-popular shows as "Dawson's Creek" and "Buffy the Vampire
Slayer." Since July, at least 32 programs have been involved.

It's total mind war for every 12- and 13-year-old, an age group currently
setting records for drug use. The emphasis is on telling them there are no
social consequences to avoiding drugs - giving them an easy way to just say
no.

"If you look at the forces in a kid's life when it comes to perceptions of
drugs, it's not just ads," said Levitt. "It's programming on television,
it's the Internet, it's music, it's pop culture, it's the
legalization-of-marijuana movement, it's school programs that are mediocre
at best, it's sports figures and rock stars."

Research on the effectiveness of social marketing is slim. A few studies
have shown that people's health habits are the hardest to change because
they are being asked to give up gratification for possible long-term
benefits.

If the social marketing ads are poorly produced, they run the risk of
encouraging the behavior they are trying to stop.

Last week, a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found
that anti-smoking TV ads created by Philip Morris Co. are backfiring. A 17-
state coalition may soon ask the company to hand over $75 million it set
aside for the ads so an independent agency can do them correctly.

For many social marketing experts, changing behavior means getting the
entire community focused on the problem, not just producing TV ads. It also
means changing public policy, for instance, say, getting condoms distributed
or outlawing cigarette vending machines.

"Unless we can mobilize community opinion leaders and gatekeepers, we're not
going to get the enduring change that we want," said Larry Bye, founder of
S.F.- based Communication Sciences Group, which evaluates social marketing
campaigns.

Taking on Big Tobacco

Another cautionary tale on changing public attitudes can be seen in
California's anti-smoking efforts, once the envy of the country. The
pioneering effort started in 1988, when voters approved Proposition 99, a
25-cents-a-pack cigarette tax.

Former Gov. George Deukmejian let the state Department of Health Services
run the program, and they produced a TV ad so effective it is still
remembered in surveys and focus groups.

Called "Industry Spokesman," it featured a tobacco executive talking about
the need to get kids addicted and laughing while he says, "We're not in this
for our health."

But soon after taking office, Wilson began diverting money from the media
campaign to local health programs, calling the mass media push a second-tier
priority. Health officials banned any ads that attacked the industry or
showed tobacco executives telling Congress that nicotine wasn't addictive.

Sandra Smoley, then Wilson's secretary for health and welfare, said it was
"offensive for the government to use taxpayer funds to call a private
industry a liar," according to a recent UC-San Francisco study.

The Department of Health Services under Wilson eventually produced other
anti-smoking ads. Considered equally effective, they included a
groundbreaking campaign that links smoking with impotence, and a disturbing
piece showing an addicted woman smoking through a hole in her throat.

"We've always felt a need to take an aggressive look at the tobacco industry
as a co-conspirator," said Colleen Stevens, chief of the state's tobacco
control media campaign. "Unless we counter the messages they are sending
out, we can't be successful."

Although the percentage of adults smoking in California has dropped
dramatically - and a change in public attitude has led to tough smoke-free
workplace laws - teenage smoking rates have remained steady. The UCSF study
showed direct links between Wilson's anti- tobacco policies and a leveling
off of smoking rates.

This is why anti-smoking crusaders worry about the $1.45 billion set aside
for advertising in the recent $206 billion tobacco settlement. Unlike
Florida, who's hard-hitting ads relentlessly ridicule the tobacco industry,
the omnibus U.S. settlement agreement does not allow direct attacks on the
industry.

Some worry that money will be wasted. The ads need to attack the industry,
critics contend, because teenagers don't like it when authority figures -
like Big Tobacco - appear to be manipulating them. Otherwise, it appears the
government is trying to manipulate them in the ads.

"It's possible to spend huge amounts of money," said Dr. Stanton Glantz, a
noted UC-San Francisco critic of the tobacco industry, "and not accomplish
anything."