ABSTRACT
Devising effective mass communication drug prevention strategies poses a difficult challenge to campaign design specialists and media professionals. This chapter reviews conventional strategies from the general health campaign literature and offers some promising innovative approaches that may achieve greater success in addressing the drug problem. Disciplined campaign designers must undertake tedious homework before progressing to the fun phase of message creation. The designer needs to specify focal segments of the population whose health behavior is to be changed. Health campaigns that are directly targeted to the focal segment of the population tend to have a modest degree of impact, and the effects on fundamental values and behavior patterns are very limited. The campaign designer must adeptly steer through minefield of audience resistance barriers at each stage of response, from exposure to processing to learning to yielding to behavioral implementation. A typical health campaign might subdivide the population on a dozen dimensions, each with multiple levels.
