Multimedia in Health Promotion - Essay Example

Multimedia Multimedia Introduction The media is a significant acquaintance in any public health case. It is usually a source of accurate information and advocate for proper health actions (Pechmann & Knight 2002, p. 6). Both the international and local media plays a key role in linking health workers plus the wider public. Health practitioners teach and entrust the media with significant health facts that they pass to the public in understandable formations in a variety of channels (Truss 2010, p. 15). For example, to spread information concerning influenza, the U.K. government appointed the Academy for Educational Development with the task of creating a training program in order to assist local media houses in comprehending the complexity of influenza so that they can report it to the public effectively (Truss 2010, p. 15). Health promotion requires both social marketing and media advocacy, which highly determine the effectiveness of this endeavour (Pechmann & Knight 1994, p. 236). Social marketing endeavours to create and incorporate marketing ideas with other different approaches in order to persuade actions, which benefit people and societies for a much greater social good. It seeks to incorporate research, theory, best practise, audience, as well as partnership insights, so as to enlighten people on the delivery of competition sensitive plus segmented social change programs, which are efficient, effective, sustainable and equitable. Media advocacy, on the other hand, is the tactical use of news-making in order to support public debate along with generating society support for transformations in society policies and norms through TV, newspapers and radio (Grossman & Chaloupka 1997, p. 290). Public members are the final decision-makers and opinion leaders in today’s world so you can imagine the effect an effective health promotion advert on TV on the effects of smoking can do to them. This paper will plan a health promotion media resource, TV, for smoking. The main purpose it to discuss how television can be used effectively to pass a message across that smoking is harmful to peoples’ health. Cigarette smoking remains one of the main causes of early death in a majority of countries; 20% of all deaths. Research has revealed that people who smoke are more prone to die from smoking compared to any other cause of death (Lefebvre 2011, p. 54). In the United Kingdom, smoking has taken away the lives of over a million citizens in the form of heart disease and cancer in the past decade and researchers have tagged it as the main contributor to the health gap between the poor and the rich. Even though, its dangers have been greatly advertised for years, regimes have really been slow in reacting and countering the issues with the kind of resources and law often brought to bear on other, far less worrying, issues of public health. The old saying that prevention is always than cure appears not to have been observed with reference to illnesses caused by smoking (Lefebvre 2013, p. 18). However, the mass media has helped health practitioners grow their audience because of the extensive reach it has. In form of television or radio, the mass media is an effective method of persuading people to change to fresh behaviours like persuading smokers to stop smoking (Lefebvre 2013, p. 18). A normal television advert runs for approximately 45 seconds (Neiger et al. 2003, p. 75). This is because they are fast and easy to develop and broadcast, and in the same spirit, media houses make a fortune out of this. They are will to advertise one single advert even 100 times a day so long as the advertiser meets their demands. Apart from education the public about risk of smoking, as well as where can seek help, television can also keep the public up to date concerning anti-smoking campaigns (Kotler et al. 2002, p. 63). Television can empower rural communities to fight major causes of smoking mortality such as cancer and heart diseases that can be prevented through endorsing the anti-smoking messages and inform masses of the effects of smoking such as also endangering the health of passive smokers. Television can also be used to enlighten people on new health skills like reducing the amount of cigarette you smoke per day in order to, which in the end you will be smoking a cigarette per day to find that you have completely stopped smoking (Andreasen 1995, p. 15). Intervention When it comes to the media, the efforts of decreasing smoking behaviours should have only two aims, highlighting the dangers of smoking with reference to people’s health and decrease the number of smokers and also potential smokers. For example, TV can be a nice way to advocate for Statewide Anti-Smoking campaign aimed at 12 to 17 years old children, which are smoking illegally or a planning to smoke (Wallack & Dorfman 1996, p. 293). The campaign, which was developed a few years ago with a group of teen advisors, has not yet found its feet till today because of inadequate advertising, but television presents itself as a better opportunity to promote the campaigns. The idea for such a campaign should be to let viewers know that smoking can be very addictive, as well as hard to quit (Wallack 1994, p. 420). The government should also be involved in such an endeavour because the money come from tobacco inform of taxation is millions of dollars, which can be utilised for prevention efforts (Haq et al. 2010, p. 460). This will at least make the campaign seem true to both the media and the eyes of the public. Fighting an addiction takes someone who is committed and even addictive smokers admit that it is overly hard to quit smoking once you have started. Health practitioners say that many people argue that that they can quit smoking on their will, but see a different result (Haq et al. 2010, p. 460). The chemicals drive in such smokers to smoke is more compared to their drive to quite due to their addiction. Such matters are what television advertisers should dwell on, particularly when it comes to people who want to start smoking in order for them to know what they are about to start (Haq et al. 2010, p. 460). In the past, a marketing campaign, which has been effective in getting its message across to the audience, is thetruth.com. The Settlement Act (1997) was even funded the organization, which was considered as the number one anti-smoking endorsement company (Farrelly et al. 2002, p. 901). The anti-smoking campaign comprised of many ways of reaching the general public. The main method they used was advertising the hazards, which smoking can cause to people. The ads were both in English and Spanish, which include television ads, posters, radio ads, cinema advertising, social media, online media, as well as original websites and Internet advertising (Farrelly et al. 2002, p. 901). Such an endeavour is that the proposed plan for television health promotion against anti-smoking should copy. This is because the endeavour by thetruth.com worked like magic in preventing people to smoke as statistics showed (Farrelly et al. 2002, p. 901). Mass Media and Social Marketing to Reduce Smoking Digital communications, television in particular, should proffer specific unhealthy messages together with seductive lifestyle pictures linked to cigarette brands (Farrelly 2008, p. 42). Cable television, video games and the web provide endless chances for comorbid behaviour. Product marketers, at the same time, should market risks of cigarette smoking. They should use behavioural, exposure and persuasion theories so as to target changes in health risk behaviour on smoking. Social cognitive theory derived from response effects, behavioural modelling and observational learning should widely be used (Wallack & Dorfman 1996, p. 293). Persuasion theory argues that individuals have to engage in message elaboration by developing favourable ideas about a messages arguments in order for long term persuasion to take place. Exposure theorists research how the length and intensity of exposure to a message persuades behaviour (Farrelly et al. 2009, p. 379). The television campaigns should make use of these theories to discern behavioural determinants, which can be modified. For instance, social marketing channeled to anti-smoking should make use of behavioural theory to discern connections between behavioural determinants of smoking, such as availability of cigarettes, stress within the family and income in the community, and the glamorisation of smoking in marketing (Farrelly et al. 2009, p. 380). The television campaigns should utilise factors to build conceptual frameworks, which develop complex pathways from messages to changes in behaviour in order for the TV ads to be effective to their target population. For instance, the truth campaign focused on these theories for their social marketing technique, and to date, this campaign is the one known to have the greatest impact all over the United States when it came to persuading people to stop smoking (Farrelly et al. 2009, p. 380). Nearly 30% of the smoking population quit smoking after the campaign (Farrelly et al. 2009, p. 380). Media Advocacy and Reduction of Smoking When it comes to reduction of smoking and media advocacy, the mass campaign should come up with themes that make the public question whether smoking is of any benefit or disadvantage to them. You need to make people understand that the disadvantages of smoking always outweigh its addictive advantages because in the end it will ruin your health (PSA Bibliography n.d, p. 1). For example, in the truth campaign, through their use of media advocacy, the program not only gathered a group of public and advertising relations firms, but also joined forces with Floridian youth to create a campaign, which would successfully reach out their generation (PSA Bibliography n.d, p. 1). You can tell this really worked because a majority of the youths expressed their frustrations with the manipulative and scheming marketing tactics utilised by the tobacco industry, and explained that the truth campaign was ideal for them since it gave them actual truth and facts concerning cigarette smoking (PSA Bibliography n.d, p. 1). From this, their materialised the idea of uniting the youth in a fight against both cigarette smoking and tobacco companies through promoting grassroots advocacy together with a youth-driven marketing campaign (PSA Bibliography n.d, p. 1). This is what any television campaign against smoking should emulate because the truth campaign was effective in helping reduce the smoking population in the entire United States by over 30% (PSA Bibliography n.d, p. 1). Health practitioners and media houses can look at where the truth campaign failed like why it only managed to reach 30% and not maybe over 50% and rectify this in their campaign (PSA Bibliography n.d, p. 1). For example, you can give people warning signs that they might cause them to engage in smoking and allow them to deal with these signs before it is too late. Conclusion and Recommendations In order to tell the progress of such an endeavour, you can set up a small control population of maybe 30 individuals who a deep smokers. You can monitor these individuals for maybe a given period of six months and watch their smoking habits at they view these adverts on TV and whether it will make them stop smoking. Because these campaigns will mainly be channeled through television, it is less significant to talk to such individuals to advise them to stop smoking because it will not have served the purpose of the marketing campaign. What we want to achieve is persuade smokers to stop smoking through television alone. In order to persuade such individuals, the social marketing theory, as earlier stated in this paper can be a very effective tool in persuading people to stop smoking. Smokers will at least feel as if the people persuading them to stop smoking actually care about them rather than just them quitting smoking. In conclusion, this paper has discussed how to promote anti-smoking campaigns through television advertising. Research has shown that when people are revealed to the key effects of smoking, that is when they actually consider quitting smoking unlike just being told that smoking is harmful to your health. Instead of telling people such a statement like the one above, you can show them images of how smoking ruins ones lungs or how diseases such as cancer, which are caused by smoking, ruins the human body. You can also display to them researched statistics of how smoking wastes someone’s funds from buying of the cigarette once you turn into an addict and also the heavy hospital bill that one pays in case they develop the illnesses associated to smoking. However, taking this outside of the television scene, any anti-smoking campaign should allow their target audience to really know what smoking does to them bit it on the internet, poster or radio advertising. Smokers should even consider the warning sign place on cigarette packs that it is harmful to their health and then they should choose their fate. References Andreasen, A R 1995, Marketing social change: changing behavior to promote health, social development, and the environment, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Farrelly, M 2008, Sustaining ‘truth’: changes in youth tobacco attitudes and smoking intentions after 3 years of a national antismoking campaign, Health Education Research vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 42–48. 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