A 10-Year Retrospective of Research in Health Mass Media Campaigns: Where Do We Go From Here?

Mass media campaigns have long been a tool for promoting public health. How effective are such campaigns in changing health-related attitudes and behaviors, however, and how has the literature in this area progressed over the past decade? The purpose of the current article is threefold. First, I discuss the importance of health mass media campaigns and raise the question of whether they are capable of effectively impacting public health. Second, I review the literature and discuss what we have learned about the effectiveness of campaigns over the past 10 years. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of possible avenues for the health campaign literature over the next 10 years. The overriding conclusion is the following: The literature is beginning to amass evidence that targeted, well-executed health mass media campaigns can have small-to-moderate effects not only on health knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes, but on behaviors as well, which can translate into major public health impact given the wide reach of mass media. Such impact can only be achieved, however, if principles of effective campaign design are carefully followed.

I gratefully acknowledge Phil Palmgreen for his mentorship in the media campaigns area and the special issue editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I also thank Ashley Clark and Abby Miller for assistance retrieving articles and building a reference database for the current project.

Notes

Although the current article encompasses a review of the campaign literature from 1996 forward, these meta-analyses examined literature from differing times frames, including 1974–1997 (Snyder & Hamilton, 2002) and 1958–1998 (Derzon & Lipsey, 2002).

Different authors highlight slightly different sets of principles of effective campaign design, although there is much overlap in this area as well. The current list of campaign principles is meant to be a representation of the major principles of effective campaign design, although sometimes others are discussed as well (see Randolph & Viswanath, 2004; Rogers & Storey, 1987).

Campaigns also were examined in order to see if they were designed and evaluated by practitioners or by academics. One might hypothesize that there would be differences in outcome evaluation design or other factors in practitioners' campaigns as compared with campaigns developed and evaluated by academics in a research setting, where resources are sometimes more plentiful. Unfortunately, this was difficult, if not impossible, to determine from the information provided in the articles.