Getting the 'active' message across

A recent Western Australian study has applied a new approach to the assessment of media awareness based on the Statewide Find Thirty health campaign.

According to the study, the findings have implications for the "planning, execution and evaluation of future campaigns aimed at physical activity in adult populations".

UWA School of Public Health lecturer Justine Leavy is the lead author of the study and says the research applied a "novel approach" of creating 'profile' to examine patterns of awareness over time.

"To our knowledge this has not been done before in the physical activity mass media literature," Dr Leavy says.

"Mostly campaign evaluation consists of comparing two groups, such as those who were aware of the campaign and those who were not aware … using cross-sectional data, which represents a 'snap-shot' in time.

"In this research, we followed the same group of people over two years, and collected data at four time points, essentially following a cohort of people, and then created four profiles to examine awareness patterns over time."

The four profiles comprise of: 'never', 'early', 'late', or 'always' aware.

The results indicate 30.4 per cent of respondents were 'never aware' of the campaign, with 10 per cent 'always aware'.

Thirty-eight per cent recalled the campaign 'early', whereas the remainder, of 21.9 per cent were 'late'.

Dr Leavy says there was no significant demographic differences between the awareness profile groups except on gender, specifically, higher levels of awareness amongst women compared with men.

"Some suggestions as to why this may be the case were that women appeared in six of the Find Thirty every day® TV commercials and the 'actors' were in fact 'real people' recruited for the campaign and reflected a variety of body shapes and sizes," she says.

"These targeted elements of the campaign may largely explain the higher levels of awareness among women, because the content featured people and scenarios that they could identify with and confirmed their own beliefs."

Dr Leavy says these results have implications for the future planning and coordinating of major TV campaigns, such as the need for finite segmentation of the intended primary target audience.

"The results of this study suggest a communication strategy that consists of small blocks of TV advertisements that rotate over the shorter term, together with advertisements executed with a specific message differentiated for individual sub groups all delivered as part of a media-led, multi-year intervention."