The Following is a Public Service Announcement: How can Public Health Communication be Made More Effective?

BACKGROUND. Public Service Announcements (PSA) relating to health communication are prevalent in daily society and life. Therefore, it is important to understand what factors influence how effective PSAs are, or can be. Many ideas exist, with some debate, within the academic community about this. Given the recent COVID-19 global pandemic, throughout which public health communication was extensive internationally, now is a good time to examine how health campaign efficacy can be improved, especially in relation to the possible uses of social media (SM).METHOD. A literature review was conducted of 6 (11) studies, which identified and discussed repeat concepts and patterns across works, and outlined possible implications for both future study and current practice.RESULTS. Evidence has been found in favour of PSA personalisation, i.e. tailoring messaging to target specific demographics, in making PSAs more memorable and more likely to lead to behavioural change. It was also found that livestreamed and/or video SM content is more engaging, in part due to two-way, real-time communication.CONCLUSION. Many factors influence how engaging or memorable a PSA is. Namely, memorability can be improved through identity targeting, and graphic and/or emotional imagery. Audience engagement can be improved by increasing the proportion of media released as video instead of image-only or audio-only content. Implementation of personalising campaigns to specific identities should be done ethically and with care. Future research should focus on repeating past studies with larger sample sizes, and investigating more nuanced questions, e.g. if some identities are more effective to target than others.