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- Public, Thursday 4 September 2008 10.58 BST
What's black and white and full of students? The punchline is ... our database. Funny or not, a campaign by TV Licensing to remind the inhabitants of the 317,000 student rooms on university campuses that they too have to pay the licence fee seems to have been effective.
From 2003 TV Licensing (the trade name of the companies contracted to the BBC to collect the charge from owners of sets) used mail shots, online advertisements, trails on the BBC and posters. Their student campaign may help explain an increase in licences of 8% in the first year it ran and 24% in the subsequent year; two years on, 94% of a sample of students recalled the campaign.
Each year the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) publishes a study called Advertising Works! The exclamation mark recalls the old adman's adage that half of all advertising budgets are wasted, but nobody knows which half. Creative people tend to exaggerate their impact on the world and advertising, a multibillion industry that conventional economics can't quite explain or justify, is no exception.
Yet a body of evidence does exist correlating media campaigns and, say, changes in market share or consumption of certain brands - they are convincing enough for Marks & Spencer, the Halifax and other well known companies to spend hugely.
Changes in public behaviour
The IPA also has a large bank of studies of campaigns carried out on behalf of Whitehall departments and here too there are striking associations between the cost of campaigns and certain changes in public behaviour. Their studies have been mined for a new book*, published with the support of the Central Office of Information (COI).
In a foreword, Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, calls it groundbreaking and for once that large adjective is spot on - though you are left wondering why no one before has tried to evaluate just what central government gets for an advertising spend that comes behind only the soap giants Procter and Gamble and Unilever. (No one knows how much the state, including councils and peripheral bodies, spends in total.)
The book lists campaigns to encourage people to pay their taxes on time, to become teachers and Northern Ireland police officers, to lock up their cars, to join the army, and - this one targeted on younger men - not to drink and drive. The signs of their effectiveness are there for all to see.
Desired effect
Yet Peter Buchanan, the deputy chief executive of the COI, who masterminded the project, makes no heroic claims on behalf of government advertising, welcome though the evidence of its effects is. Himself an adman by background - he worked on the Nestle, BP and Procter & Gamble accounts while at Saatchi and Saatchi - he notes that commercial advertising works by getting people to try a new brand or switch from one brand to another.
Giving up smoking or joining the armed forces are by contrast "life changing" events - death defying in one case, you might say, and life threatening in the other. You are necessarily dealing here with a different order of message and desired effect.
Impact is usually measured first through people's recall of the campaign and then whether they say their behaviour has changed. Ultimately, real changes in behaviour ought to be measurable by road accident statistics or, say, a declining cancer death rate. "Government advertising," says Buchanan, "is most effective where it goes with the grain of society."
The book offers case studies and a toolkit rather than models. Sometimes shock tactics work - such as the original Aids awareness advertising 20 years ago. Sometimes, advertising works best if it seems to be offering helpful facts, proffered in a low key way.
"Over the years, I don't think government's capacity to influence behaviour has been reduced." But Buchanan, who began his own career back in the mists of time working for British Leyland cars, notes the rules of the road for his colleagues - to ensure their knowledge of people's thinking and doing is up to date, to "understand where the target audience is".
A government advertising campaign rarely works alone. From 1998 successive campaigns sought to persuade younger graduates to teach, but increases in teacher pay and warm words from ministers about the profession helped. In the book it's claimed the advertising campaign paid for itself 86 times over - but that's based on a complex and hypothetical valuation to do with the cost of paying supply teachers for all the slots actually occupied by the additional teachers recruited, minus those who fell by the wayside before their training and probation was up (a surprising third).
Quality of public services
Rebecca Morgan and John Poorta of the agencies Lowe Worldwide and Leo Burnett say "the fact is that advertising has proved a truly efficient form of government investment", arguing that as well as financial savings campaigns have saved lives and improved the quality of public services by retaining and recruiting staff.
And yet pinning down precise causes is hard. These two admit that money spent nationally on advertising smoke alarms could have been given to local fire and rescue services. They say: "it is clear the campaign was a focusing agent, to get the issue on the agenda of house dwellers nationally so that when local fire brigades [undertook] their own local fire alarm drives, people were more predisposed to listen."
Buchanan emphasises knowing the audience - remembering, for example, that some 30% of the population, often those the state wants most to reach, are not online or regular users of the web. On the other hand young people, another regular target group for messages, are often sophisticated in their use of media.
The COI itself, when giving advice to departments, is media neutral. What Buchanan wants them to do, more than anything, is think hard before they write the briefs that the COI will use in negotiating with advertising agencies: planning and research in advance are critical, both for ministers and policy civil servants. "Lack of time is the great enemy" to campaign effectiveness, he concludes.
* How public service advertising works, World Advertising Research Center, warc.com, £32
