Public Service Announcements

Public service advertising gives organizations the opportunity to use the same channels of communication that big commercial advertisers use but on relatively small budgets. It is not unusual for a television public service campaign produced and distributed on a budget of $25,000 to $50,000, or a radio campaign done for $13,000 - $20,000, to get airtime that would have cost $1 million to $5 million as paid advertising. In fact, public service advertising probably is the greatest "value" an organization can get. Paying for time allows an advertiser to choose stations and airtimes, while when and where PSAs are played is up to public service directors. But PSAs typically cost less than 1% of the time value they garner so they rank much higher in cost-efficiency.

Analysis of a typical TV public service campaign shows:

70% of plays between 7:00 a.m. and 1:30 a.m. - from the start of the morning news shows to the end of the late night talk shows, in most parts of the country.
40% of those plays are between 6:00 p.m., when the local evening news starts, and 12:30 a.m., when late shows are ending.
44% of plays in the 50 largest markets
In the first 26 weeks of the campaign, the PSAs play 300 times per week; in the second 26 weeks 100-300 times per week... and then wind down to about 30 plays in the campaign's 78th week.

Opportunities for PSAs abound.
Television and radio stations are no longer required to carry public service announcements but broadcasters consider them almost indispensable to fill unsold commercial time. A similar imperative can be seen in newer outlets that were never regulated and licensed like stations: as soon as cable networks began airing commercials and cable systems began inserting commercials in those networks at the local level, these outlets started using PSAs. Other outlets that air PSAs are national and regional cable television and radio networks. In all, the television and radio media each have more than 10,000 outlets that could be considered for a public service campaign.

Evaluating Success
For both television and radio PSAs, we track with the SIGMA system that we helped A.C. Nielsen develop for electronically monitoring PSAs. This system gives us the station, date and time of each play. Dubs for distribution directly to stations can be given one code, dubs for local offices of an organization to carry to stations another, and dubs for tapes given to networks still another. Then, monitored plays can be separated as to source. Monitoring is only the first step in analyzing radio and TV PSAs. For example, because a single PSA play is counted as multiple plays when reception of the electronic code is interrupted, SIGMA data can have a lot of duplicates. We created programs to delete these duplicate plays. It is not unusual for a widely distributed campaign to accumulate more than 10,000 monitored plays, making it difficult to “see the forest for the trees."

Our computer programs summarize the data, presenting it in easy-to-read listings, tables and charts, including:

Listings of all networks and stations that aired the campaign with station call letters, channel, network affiliation and market rank, as well as the dollar value and "viewer impressions" achieved by plays to date.
Tables summarizing the number of markets, outlets, telecasts, broadcast hours, "viewer impressions" and commercial dollar value of each spot, and total for the campaign.
Tables and graphs of monitored plays for each hour of the day or each day of the week, number of stations or number of plays by market rank and network affiliation. We can prepare graphs that show plays per week for every week of the campaign.

Any organization that, directly or through a producer or agency, has relied on DWJ's PCS division usually becomes aware of the critical difference long-term specialization in PSA placement can make.

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