Advertising gloss won't alter basics of public health

Published on Saturday 11 June 2005 01:55

WHAT is the point of the Scottish Executive's public health and information campaigns? You can see them incessantly on your television and they dominate the 48-sheet hoardings that brighten up our bleakest urban landscapes, but do they have any tangible benefit and are there better alternatives?

It is a question well worth asking, for, like so many other instances, our Scottish government's approach is to spend yet more money, even if it is falling short of desired results.

Consider these facts. The most notable if not the most memorable campaign was for Healthy Living and has cost about 3m since its launch in 2003. It initially generated a lively response in the number of calls to its helpline but these quickly fell off.

With so few calls, the individual expense of handling these inquiries resulted in the task being transferred to the NHS 24 helpline. For the Executive this had the benefit of making it impossible for its critics to break down the current unit cost.

The public's requests for healthy living advice initially seemed to correlate with the volume of advertising, but that all changed this year when an increase in advertising spend did not see a significant rise in calls. The results of the Healthy Living campaign now look pretty ugly and no amount of cosmetic surgery can make its figures look pretty.

Ironically, the Safe and Healthy Working campaign was abandoned before it was launched. Intended to discourage attacks on public sector workers, such as firefighters, it was canned after unions warned the Scottish Executive that it might lead to copycat attacks. 200,000 had been the earmarked budget.

Government ministers, both at Holyrood and Westminster, like using state-funded advertising campaigns. It gives the public the impression that the politicians they have elected to run the government are actually doing something - even if the adverts simply exhort the public to do something themselves.

They also offer two distinct political advantages. Firstly, compared to passing legislation, they are very quickly produced and are highly visible. Secondly, ministers have complete control over them.

Creating the appearance of a busy government working on your behalf is irresistible to media-savvy politicians and, as BBC's Panorama once pointed out, offers a reasonable possible explanation as to why the media spend on these campaigns regularly peaks in the months preceding parliamentary elections. Funny that.

After MSPs from the Conservatives and SNP started to complain about the rising costs of Scottish Executive advertising, the then finance Minister, Andy Kerr, promised to take control and reduce the budget. It has since fallen from a peak of 13m in 2002/03 to just over 9m in 2003/04 and appears to have plateaued at this figure.

This missed the point. It's not just the cost that is being questioned but also the use of such campaigns in principle and their effectiveness in practice - the Healthy Living campaign providing food for thought.

Are there alternatives to the growing use of advertising as a tool of government? Well, not if you believe state interference is the solution to our social ills.

Politicians that believe the nanny state is justified in interfering in our private lives will continue to see these campaigns as a legitimate method of telling people how they should behave. The creatives in the ad agencies will naturally compete to produce the most imaginative and entertaining communications and some of the campaigns will be cute, but will they change behaviour?

Just as great marketing can't save a bad product, great advertising can't save a flawed approach. Simply lecturing the public on how they should behave is doomed to fail. Some may point to the success of drink-driving campaigns in changing the public mood, but these campaigns have been consistently running for thirty years and have had the field to themselves. Now there are so many health-warning campaigns that the focus is gone and viewers' attention is lost.

The natural lessons about healthy eating gathered from family life can no longer be taken for granted. In many cases, both parents in a family are working and so a child's experience of making food in the kitchen is rare. The pressures on single parents can be harder.

Convenience foods are just that, a convenience, but they are disconnecting children from the origins of the food they eat and then these children become mums and dads with no experience of their own to pass on. The cycle needs to be broken and it has to start in the schools - not with advertising.

Far more important is to start in our schools with the basics, from showing people what vegetables actually look and feel like - then getting them to chop them, grate them and, of course eat them - raw and cooked. When Jamie Oliver flashed a leek at some school kids and asked them what it was the answers included carrot and potato - no-one said a leek.

Adverts which tell people that real fish is a healthy option fail to recognise that many in the audience are unfamiliar with a fish that hasn't already been filleted. Let's stop swimming against the tide. It might be harder and it might be slower, but going back to these basics in our schools and helping people take responsibility for their own decisions will, I believe, produce better results.

• Brian Monteith spent 16 years in marketing before becoming a Conservative MSP in 1999