More than a dozen nominations, hundreds of participants, thousands of posters, media articles, and commercials urging women to reject abortion, calling for efforts against AIDS, for helping orphans to find families, against GM foods — all this is the tip of the iceberg The Day saw during the opening ceremony of the Fourth National Social Advertising Festival recently held in Kyiv.
In four years since its inception this festival has attracted over 3,000 participants, mostly young creative individuals prepared to share their views on social problems with the rest of society, using advertising means. However, the aim of this festival is not only to show what the advertisers have accomplished over the year, but also to study Ukraine’s social advertising trends and efficiency ratio — in other words, what kinds of ideas that are being conveyed prove most effective in influencing man and his conduct.
EFFECTIVE OR FUTILE
Vivid proof of its effect on society is the fact that there is a grade school in Kyiv where they regularly hold the “weeks/months of social measures,” inviting expert social workers in the juvenile field to meet with fifth-graders and tell them about such harmful habits as smoking, using posters, slide shows, and other visual aids. Meanwhile, senior students, aided by teachers, organize contests for the best grow-healthy-wealthy-and-wise poster, healthy lifestyle roundtables, etc. Effective? At this school, both students and teachers unanimously assure that it is.
Says Alina Muzyka, fifth-grade student, Special School No. 20, Minsky District, Kyiv: “We recently heard expert social workers who told us about smoking as a major threat to our health. They showed us posters with pictures of smokers’ and non-smoking people’s lungs, malignant tumors attacking various parts of the body, and resulting from smoking. They also ran tests that showed the damage done to your organism after smoking a cigarette. After the lesson we spent a long time discussing this with our classmates.
“I spoke to my parents at home and dad said he’d quit smoking.
I think that such demonstration lessons should be conducted at every school; I know that lots of people my age are smokers, simply because smoking is cool, but they don’t realize how bad this habit is for their health. I’ve personally long since decided I’d never smoke, but what
I saw [and heard] was additional proof.”
School No. 20 has made such projects standard practice.
On that particular occasion, the Social Advertising Week included lectures for fifth-graders and a roundtable on HIV risks for the senior students.
Says Larysa Yakymenko, the school’s vice principal for education: “We often invite social workers to promote a healthy lifestyle, although I can’t tell you exactly what they have to say to the students because I’m not present during such classes. However, the positive effect is clearly apparent.
“From the outset we believed that our students would pay more attention to people they’ve never met before and would be willing to discuss things and agree to take part in various kinds of tests. We were right because after such special classes the lecturers tell us to focus our attention on and help certain students by encouraging them to discuss their problems. I know that our children are silent but very attentive during such special classes, because they’re listening to total strangers. Senior students also attend such classes, although we’re more interested in the younger ones, because with them such social preventive measures are more effective — I mean the anti-smoking lectures.”
Have you noticed any positive changes among your fifth-graders after such social projects?
“We carried out this kind of project involving fifth-graders last year and held a meeting with their parents shortly afterward. We were told by parents about their children’s impressions and how shocked they were to tell their parents about how many people were dying because of smoking and other diseases. Such projects are being supported by parents. They say that since they don’t know how to straighten out their kids, other than forbidding things, it is better to leave it to the school where this task can be handled better, in a professional way. They believe that the kinds of discussions we practice in class are far more effective.
“There are special anti-drug abuse classes for the sixth- and seventh-graders, and HIV/AIDS prevention classes for the grades eight through eleven. On December 1, World AIDS Day, we held a roundtable arranged by senior students. It was presided over by the school president who had spent the summer at a children’s R&R camp in Odesa, where they had a training course on this subject, so he was there to share some of the borrowed ideas and conducted the roundtable quite efficiently.”
Summing up your social projects, does the expected result match the real outcome?
“The result is good when at least two out of 28 students attending a lecture leave feeling they’ve learned something and that there is something they want to learn. In our school there are virtually no smokers now. Several years ago we could constantly smell cigarette smoke in the lavatories. Now there is no smell. I’m not saying that all of our eleventh-graders are nonsmokers, but that there is less evidence, and I think the reason is that these young people have changed their mind.”
ONLY 8 PERCENT OF UKRAINIANS RESPOND TO SOCIAL ADVERTISING
Experts at the social research company R&B and the organizers of the festival conducted a special poll in November 2009 to find out how many adult Ukrainians trust social advertising. Their findings showed that a mere eight percent of the respondents were inclined to change their behavior for the better under the influence of social advertising; 38 percent were pondering the problems raised by social advertising; 29 percent felt unaffected, and 12 percent were opposed to it.
Says R&B expert Maryna Kasian: “There seems to be no reason for asking our fellow citizens whether they need social advertising, because this advertising technique is being actively used by the civilized countries in order to improve public behavior and shape a positive attitude to pressing problems. Sad but true: 54 percent of Ukrainians say they don’t need social advertising. This skeptical attitude is explained by the fact that not all Ukrainian citizens can distinguish between social and commercial advertising. Add here the decades of Soviet brainwashing.
“Some of these people simply can’t make themselves agree with what they see and hear. Our society is not yet ready to comprehend the role that social advertising can play. The poll findings clearly show that social advertising is having varying effects on Ukrainians, making some happy and others angry. With this in mind, we asked what kind of social advertising had the most pronounced effect on the respondents. We were told that most of the respondents (42 percent) pointed to TV commercials; 19 percent picked social talk shows; 16 percent said it’s journalists and their reports and articles. We also learned that outdoor advertising, social campaigns, and social articles in the press also had an impact but a much smaller one.”
Kasian adds that the respondents’ attitude to social advertising is often influenced by such factors as gender, place of residence, and neighborhood. Female respondents (44 percent) are influenced by social advertising more than men (30 percent). Western Ukrainians noted the impact of social advertising more often than those in the eastern regions. A mere 31 percent of Kyivites admitted being emotionally influenced by social advertising, compared to 39 percent among urban residents and 42 percent in rural areas.
Kasian adds: “The most tangible aspect of social advertising is not just attracting one’s attention to a certain problem, but also prompting the consumer to act the right way to solve this problem. We tried to figure out the biggest problems facing our fellow Ukrainians. Topping the list are health, combating AIDS, the flu epidemic, no-smoking campaigns, combating drugs abuse, alcoholism, followed by problem families, family problems. The political issues come third, followed by environmental, cultural, religious issues, and so on.
“In principle, all these issues are what my fellow Ukrainians would like to find in social advertising, which means that those who produce it are on the right track.
While analyzing our findings, we discovered some interesting trends. For example, university graduates (50 percent) tend to emphasize the healthy lifestyle, compared to 39 percent among graduates of lower-level educational establishments. Remarkably, the health topic was mentioned by the smallest number respondents in Kyiv, and on a slightly broader scope by those in the regional centers. Another interesting thing is that the patriotic subjects were mostly mentioned by residents of the central rather than western or southeastern regions of Ukraine.”
One other issue uppermost on the festival organizers’ mind is the advertiser’s liability. Iryna Kuznetsova, the head of the festival’s jury, believes that their creative concepts and ideas serve to determine the issues that have the greatest meaning for this society, be it AIDS, pollution of the environment, smoking, or spiritual estrangement. Another important question is the way in which the ready product is delivered in order to get feedback. We are having problems here because our fellow citizens are not always quick enough to comprehend the aims of social advertising and tend to interpret it, employing the good old he-who-pays-orders-the-music approach.
In view of this, the main task of the next festivals will be teaching Ukrainians to discern problems raised in social advertising and the proposed solutions.
