• Campaign Goal
• Target Audiences
• Communication Objectives for Youth Audiences
• Communication Objectives for Parent/Primary Caregiver Audiences
• Communication Objectives for Other Youth-Influential Adults
• Proposed Allocation of Campaign Resources
• Strategic Campaign Design Principles
• Message Execution Considerations Pertinent to All Audiences
• Message Execution Considerations for Youth Audiences
• Message Execution Considerations for Adult Audiences
• Endnotes

• To educate and enable America's youth to reject illegal drugs.¹ This includes preventing the initiation of drug use and encouraging occasional users to discontinue use.

Target Audiences

1. Youth ages 9 to 18², segmented by:
   • School level: Primary focus on middle school age adolescents (approximately ages 11 to 13).³

     Secondary focus on high school age youth (approximately ages 14 to18) and late elementary school age adolescents (approximately ages 9 to 11).⁴

   • Risk status: Primary focus on at-risk non-users⁵ and occasional users⁶ of drugs.

   And with consideration, as appropriate, of:

   • Gender differences.⁷

   • Racial and ethnic differences. ⁸

   • Differences based on region and population density (i.e., urban, suburban and rural areas).

2. Parents and other primary caregivers of children ages 9 to 18⁹, segmented by:
   • Age of children: Primary focus on parents/caregivers of middle school age adolescents.

     Secondary focus on parents/caregivers of high school age youth (approximately 14-18 years) and late elementary school age adolescents (approximately 9-11 years).

   And with consideration, as appropriate, of:

   • Racial and ethnic differences.¹⁰

   • The special concerns of current and former substance users.¹¹

3. Other youth-influential adults (e.g., other adult family members, teachers, principals, coaches, faith community members, youth group leaders, mentors, health care providers, celebrities).

Communication Objectives for Youth Audiences¹²

1. Instill the belief that most young people do not use drugs.¹³

2. Enhance perceptions that using (specific) drugs is likely to lead to a variety of negatively valued consequences:¹⁴
   • Social consequences (e.g., looking "uncool" or having other negative social qualities, alienating friends, incurring disapproval of peers, losing trust of parents and siblings, having a negative influence on younger siblings).¹⁵

   • Psychological consequences (e.g., reduced ability to concentrate, feeling lazy and unmotivated, "losing control," making bad decisions).

   • Aspirational consequences (e.g., losing driving privileges/license, losing other privileges granted by parents, failure to get good grades or to graduate, losing a job or not being hired for a job)

   • Physical consequences (e.g., loss of stamina or peak performance ability, weight gain, addiction, death).

3. Enhance perceptions that a drug-free lifestyle is more likely to lead to a variety of positively valued consequences: ¹⁶
   • Social consequences (e.g., being "cool" and socially attractive, gaining peer approval and respect, forming deeper friendships, building trust of parents, being a role model for younger siblings).

   • Physical consequences (e.g., enhanced physical performance).

   • Aspirational consequences (e.g., gaining increasing control over one's life, having a positive self-image, achieving excellence, reaching one's goals).

4. Enhance personal and social skills that promote resistance to drug use and positive lifestyle choices. These include decision-making skills, problem-solving skills, adaptive and coping skills, resistance to persuasive influences (e.g., critical viewing skills/media literacy), and general social and assertiveness skills.

5. Reinforce positive uses of time (as behavioral alternatives to drug use).

Communication Objectives for Parent/Primary Caregiver Audiences

1. Enhance perceptions of harm associated with adolescent use of marijuana and inhalants.¹⁷

2. Make parents aware that their children are at risk for using drugs and are vulnerable to the negative consequences of drug use.¹⁸

3. Enhance perceptions of personal efficacy to prevent adolescent drug use (i.e., let parents know that their actions can make a difference).¹⁹

4. Convey simple, effective parenting skills, including communication and family management skills, that are known to help prevent adolescent drug use.

   Communication skills include:

   • Discuss what the adolescent did each day after school and praise appropriate activities.²⁰

   • Establish and clearly communicate drug non-use expectations.²¹

   • Use anti-drug media campaign messages (e.g., televised advertisements) as a catalyst for discussion and message reinforcement.²²

   • Provide positive reinforcement when the adolescent initiates communication about drugs.²³

   Family management skills include:

   • Establish specific routines focused on the situations most likely to lead to substance use, particularly after-school hours. Specifically, ensure that adolescents are usually occupied during after-school hours by requiring that their homework be done or that they participate in adult-supervised recreational activities.

   • Stay involved in and actively monitor the adolescent's activities (e.g., know his or her friends and the parents of the friends, and communicate with those parents to stay better informed of the adolescent's activities).²⁴

   • Establish rules that decrease the likelihood of the adolescent being in situations that are conducive to drug use. Specifically, prohibit the adolescent from spending time with friends in anyone's home when there are no adults present, and discourage or prohibit any unsupervised association with other adolescents who use drugs. Establish and consistently apply a curfew and have rules regarding keeping a parent informed of whereabouts at all times.

   • Encourage compliance with these rules by consistently applying mild negative consequences for infractions.

5. Encourage specific community-focused actions:
   • Inquire about, and insist, that an effective anti-drug program be implemented at the adolescent's school.²⁵

   • Take action to support community anti-drug activities.

6. Encourage parents who use psycho-active substances to consider the effects of their own substance use on their adolescents and other children.²⁶

Communication Objectives for Other Youth-Influential Adults

1. Enhance perceptions of harm associated with use of marijuana and inhalants.²⁷

2. Enhance perceptions of personal efficacy to prevent drug use (i.e., let youth-influential adults know that their actions can make a difference).

3. Encourage specific individually-focused and community-focused actions to facilitate adolescent drug use prevention:
   
   • Communicate to youth the harmful (social, physical, and aspirational) consequences of using specific drugs.

   • Communicate to parents the need to take specific actions to prevent youth drug use. (See parent audience communication objectives.)

   • Advocate for effective anti-drug programs in schools and communities.

   • Take action to support community anti-drug activities.

Youth audiences:

Middle school	25%
Late elementary school	12.5%
High school	12.5%
Sub-total	50%
Parent/caregiver audience	40%
Other youth-influential adults	10%

• Because family-focused prevention efforts have a greater impact than efforts focused only on youth or parents and primary caregivers, the campaign should target both audiences. Moreover, the communication objectives for youth and parent/caregiver audiences should be complimentary and synergistic.

• The campaign messages must reinforce prevention messages delivered in other settings including schools, community organizations, and homes, and be linked to existing prevention resources in communities.²⁸ This can be accomplished, in part, by developing a communication strategy based on approaches that have been proven effective and are accepted in these settings. It can be further accomplished by encouraging community organizations, professional groups, and government agencies to incorporate the communication strategy into their new and on-going programs.²⁹

• To achieve the maximum effect, the campaign should use a full range of media mechanisms and formats in an integrated fashion and in a manner consistent with the communication strategy.³⁰

• To ensure effectiveness, all message executions should be pre-tested with diverse members of the target audience before final distribution. Moreover, where there is cause to think that messages targeted to a particular audience group can produce unintended negative consequences among other audiences, messages should also be tested with non-target audience members.

• The campaign must be sustained for a sufficient period of time in order to bring about a measurable change in the beliefs and behaviors of the target audiences.

• The central messages of the campaign should be repeated often and in a variety of ways. Repetition is important to enhance exposure and availability; variety is important to capture the range of perspectives among audience members, and so that the message will not be perceived as annoying or "stale."

• Messages for both youth and parent/caregiver audiences should focus in large measure on common transitions (e.g., the transition from elementary school to middle school) and situations (e.g., when large amounts of time are spent in settings unsupervised by a responsible adult) that are known to heighten adolescents' vulnerability to drug use initiation.

• The communication objectives for the campaign should focus on altering those mediating variables (including knowledge, beliefs and behaviors) that are known to have a significant impact on adolescent drug use.³¹

• The campaign should feature strong integrating elements to build "brand identity" in the minds of target audience members. Integrating features may include a campaign name and a logo or other graphical icon. These integrating or "branding" features can effectively position campaign messages as credible and important; in time, the "branding" features themselves can convey an anti-drug message.

• Message executions should be informed by insights from audience research, behavioral science, and the expertise of communication professionals with experience in communicating successfully to the target audience.

Message Execution Considerations Pertinent to All Audiences

• Messages should be tailored to match the age and the social and psychographic profile of the target audience³². As far as possible, however, messages should be designed to be sensitive to the sensibilities of different audience groups so that they have wider appeal and applicability.

• The more audience members can be engaged to actually think about the message (including imagined or actual rehearsal of the recommended behavior), the more likely they are to experience appropriate changes in knowledge, attitudes, and behavior.³³ Characteristics of message executions that encourage active attention include unusual, unfamiliar and novel presentations of the information, presentations in discrepant or unexpected contexts, and specific cues requesting audience members to attend to the information.³⁴

• Clearly demonstrating peers modeling performances of the recommended behaviors and/or experiencing the (negative or positive) consequences of these actions is one of the most effective means of enhancing viewers' skills, confidence to use those skills, perceptions of consequences, and motivations.³⁵

• Fear appeals can be effective, but only in combination with messages that heighten viewers' feeling of vulnerability to the threat and offer them a solution that is easy and effective.³⁶

Message Execution Considerations for Youth Audiences

• Messages produced with high "sensation value" are more effective in attracting the attention and interest of youth in the target audiences.³⁷ High "sensation value" production qualities include novelty, complexity, intensity, ambiguity, unconventionality, suspense, fast pace, and emotionality.³⁸ However, message properties such as ambiguity and rapid pacing can inhibit comprehension of message content, particularly with younger children. Thus, the use of these elements should be tempered by consideration of the age and cognitive capacities of the target audience.

• The use of peer models, especially socially attractive peer models, is an excellent means gaining the attention and interest of youth audience members. The attributes of socially attractive peer models include good looks, a sense of humor, an outgoing personality, having many friends (including older friends), and being popular with members of the opposite sex, getting good grades, liking "cool music," and being good at sports and video games.³⁹ However, the peer models used in messages should not be overly attractive "models" that the average teenager cannot identify with.

• Young people tend to pattern their expectations and behaviors based on what they observe among slightly older peers (i.e., students one or several grades ahead). To take advantage of this "looking up" phenomenon, messages that use peer modeling should feature young people who are a few years older that than members of the intended target audience.

• Peer togetherness is highly valued by young people. Conversely, separateness and being different are perceived as negatives. Themes of togetherness may be an effective means of communicating the positive social consequences of drug non-use, and themes of loneliness a means of communicating the negative consequences of use.⁴⁰

• Although teenagers want to "belong" and "fit in" they don't want to be like everyone else.⁴¹ Teenagers are striving to carve out a unique identity for themselves, and like to think that they are independent thinkers who have reached their own conclusions. Thus, advertisements that place the facts before them without explicitly exhorting them to subscribe to the message are likely to be well received. Similarly, advertisements that present and market a certain image without explicitly stating the desirability or undesirability of that image are likely to have a better impact than those that are too obvious.⁴²

• Audience research suggests the following "rules" for teen advertising: be funny; be honest; be clear; be original; use music that audience members really like; say or show an important benefit of the product; don't talk down; don't try too hard to be cool; and feature people who are about the same age as the intended audience.⁴³

• Messages should use language that is familiar to adolescents of that age group. However, there are large variations in slang among subgroups of teens, so that using anything but the most basic "teenspeak" can backfire and be perceived as inappropriate.⁴⁴ Also, teen slang should only come from the mouth of teens. Any adult efforts to appropriate teen terminology may be seen as condescending or ridiculous.

• Given the need for universal messages and the multicultural perspective of youth culture, where possible, messages should feature youth with diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Message Execution Considerations for Adult Audiences

• Although risk analogies can be useful (i.e., explaining a poorly understood risk by comparing it to another more commonly understood risk), such comparisons must be done with caution. The two risks compared should have certain qualities in common, otherwise audience members are likely to reject both the risk comparison and the message.⁴⁵

• People often have difficulty understanding quantitative expressions of risk (e.g., "a one in three chance"), yet qualitative expressions of risk (e.g., "many") are understood in vastly different ways by different people. Messages that attempt to convey risk information should, when possible, use both quantitative and qualitative expressions to increase audience comprehension.⁴⁶

• People underestimate the cumulative probability that an event will occur (e.g., the odds of wrecking a car by the time you are 18 if you drive under the influence several times per year), even if they correctly understand the odds that the event will occur on any one occasion. Expressing cumulative probabilities can be an effective means of enhancing the perceived relevance of a risk.⁴⁷

• People are in varying stages of readiness to adopt the recommended behaviors. Messages intended for people who are not yet ready to adopt the behavior should focus mostly on enhancing the perceived relevance of the recommendations, and enhancing audience member's confidence in their ability to enact the recommendations. Messages intended for people who are ready to act should focus more on the skills and other information necessary to effectively perform the recommended behaviors.⁴⁸