Results tagged “psa” from Uncivil Society
While it may seem odd now for someone to be protesting support for a hospital, historically hospitals in the U.S. served a similar intended function as proposed national health care plans: to make health care broadly accessible by reducing costs through aggregation. The countervailing norm was private healthcare, such as personal care in the home or at a doctor's office. For a useful representation of earlier attitudes privileging home over group care, check out week two of this season of Mad Men, in which Betty Draper sees putting her father in a health care facility as a sign of failure.
The tension over social vs. private health care intensified in the late-1940s and early 1950s with Truman's proposal for mandatory national health care. In this regard panel three of the original PSA is particularly interesting in its depiction of government funding as an extension of nongovernmental cooperation. For an equally interesting blast from the past, check out this Kiplinger Changing Times article on the debate over socialized healthcare . . . in 1949.
Also, here's an interesting historic connection between Superman and real-world charity: Jack Liebowitz, DC executive and Jerry Siegel bete noire, used a good chunk of his personal profits from Superman and other comic characters to fund the creation of the Long Island Jewish Hospital.
Click the pics below for larger versions. Thanks Eric!
You don't have to understand Russian to understand what's going on in these Russian PSAs aimed, respectively, and male and female beer drinkers. Each starts with a archetypical beer commercial scene celebrating the pleasure of having a beer with one's friends . . . then the ad uses a Greek statue to illustrate the effects of beer drinking on one's body. The ads are part of the Russian "Be careful" PSA series, which you can see on the invaluable adme.ru, which actually has a dedicated social ad section.
It would be interesting to see the reaction to these ads in the U.S.
Part of an upcoming Barcelona international exhibit of comics and HIV/AIDS. Check out the online archive at SIDAStudi.org.
A proposed public service project in Thailand: invite men to remove the bra of an amply endowed woman, only to have them find that the breasts have actually been removed due to cancer.
The idea is you'll have your awareness raised so you'll want to "complete" women's lives by giving a donation for replacement artificial breasts.
Whatever the virtue of the cause itself, gimmicks like this are why you'll never hear me say I want to "raise awareness":
A couple days ago I saw a van with a Make-a-Wish Foundation superhero ad on the back doors. Didn't snap a photo in time, but here's the original commercial, the story behind it and an update from the real-life kid whose wish inspired the PSA. Folks interested in nonprofits & intellectual property might noticed that the recreation in the ad does not include Spider-Man and the Green Goblin, who were part of the original granted wish.
Straight out of 1971, a record album full of PSAs informing people about their eligibility for social security benefits.
I wonder if it's on The PIrate Bay . . .
200 trolley victims in 1925--a classic Soviet PSA.
It's easy to find the problems with the above PSA, but this billboard is also a pretty accurate representation of the conclusion drawn by teen-age me upon seeing a number of my peers drop out of high school or give up college due to unplanned pregnancies. Of course, that was many moons ago, when a drugstore was the place where smitten couples went to get ice-cream sodas.
In her must-read expose' of the AIDS biz The Wisdom of Whores, epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani talks about the practice of "beating up" data in order to gain support for a cause. As Pisani explains, beating up data isn't straight-out lying; rather, it's all about presenting information in a way that creates the desired rhetorical effect, even to the point of creating possible if unproven statistics that persuade people to take the desired action.
Boinkology provides a provocative discussion of the beat-ups & design flaws in the above PSA from Chicago's Prostitution Alternatives Round Table.
Rule #1 in PSA Land: don't make the behavior you're condemning seem so cool that folks will want to try it. Now *I* want to meet the Cryptkeeper
James Lileks recounts his encounter with a nonprofit convention at Walt Disney World--and an advocate who doesn't quite grasp the importance of context and empathy. As Elvis was wont to say, welcome to my world . . .
We’re staying at the Coronado Springs, which is also a convention center. It makes for a different mix; among the families, most of which are pasty and mid-thirties with jouncy-belly kids, there’s a big contingent of pasty people in their mid-forties lugging gimme-sacks full of incredibly important material from very important conferences. The women look like managers and the men give the impression of someone who wants to golf, but cannot. The convention has to do with the Humane Society, I think. While checking in I was in front of a woman who had a T-shirt with a picture of a dead pig, and the words AUSCHWITZ BEGINS. I peered at the shirt to divine the full text: “Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals - Theodor Adornoâ€
I suspected that if an actual Auschwitz survivor had approached the woman in the shirt and upbraided her, the woman would have shrugged it off: well, she’s a little too close to the matter to see the deeper meaning. Who the *$(#% wears a picture with a slaughtered pig and a specious Auschwitz equivalence to a Disney resort check-in line, anyway? Who picks that one out of the drawer and says, oh, spot-on?
This Illinois Department of Transportation campaign has seductive women tempt dorky guys into buckling up. Like death, dumb ideas seem to come in threes:
Meanwhile, here's how the pros do it:
If you don't know that it's a jokey reference to Eliot Spitzer's personal preferences, this charitable public service ad conveys a most unintended message:
