The social responsibility of advertising: the role of public property campaigns

Abstract

Advertising forms and creates attitudes and transmits values, its massiveness transforms it into a reference for the community. Our work comes from a research about the effectiveness of public welfare campaigns, advertising typology characterized by the broadcasting of messages to achieve a better quality of life. Our project incorporates the debate about advertising campaigns’ role in its social conceptions. Our main objective is to determinate which resources, styles and approaches are relevant to communicate social issues in a responsible and effective way. This study has a non-experimental methodological design, and we used quali-quantitative collection of data techniques. We analyzed all the campaigns and at the same time we did a social analysis to comprehend the context. We submitted the sample to an analysis of content to study the messages construction trough the Ecrep table to evaluate the creativity levels, none of the campaigns exceed the low creativity levels; three Focus Groups were developed to analyze the impact and comprehension of the message and to get information about the communicational clarity, there were coincidences that most of the pieces went unnoticed. Regarding the media preferences, the audiovisuals are the most chosen. We validate the hypothesis by showing that Argentinian public welfare campaigns don’t have the essential creative resources needed to assure its efficiency. Welfare advertising should be developed with high efficiency parameters in order not to lose its essence and to contribute to the improvement of the social community.