10 percent change in behavior (Snyder, 2001). The meager literature on underage drinking prevention presented in this chapter is consistent with the limited-effects conclusion based on other health campaigns aimed at youth.
The limited potency of the media leads to several implications for campaign designers. First, designers should set realistic expectations of success, especially in the short run. They should be prepared for a long haul because many campaigns take years to achieve and maintain significant impact. Second, designers should employ some of the promising ideas presented throughout this chapter, and take care to avoid wasting resources on ineffective strategies. They should give more emphasis to relatively attainable impacts by aiming at more receptive segments of the audience and by creating or promoting more palatable positive products. Campaign designers should augment the relatively small set of packaged campaign stimuli with message multipliers by stimulating information seeking and sensitization and by generating public relations publicity. Furthermore, they should use a greater variety of persuasive incentives to motivate the audience, and include more educational material to help them perform the behaviors. Finally, the meager direct effects may be overcome by shifting campaign resources to indirect pathways of facilitating and controlling the behavior of the focal segment via interpersonal, organizational, and societal influences. Most of these strategies involve a broader diversity of approaches than conventionally employed in health campaigns.
Over the past few decades, a relatively limited array of strategies typically has been utilized in media-based health campaigns. The field may be well advised to diversify the approaches to campaign design beyond conventional practices. Alcohol prevention campaigns rely on a narrow set of approaches (e.g., social norming, threat of physical harm), which may be improved by considering a broader set of communication tactics that are coordinated in a more conceptually sophisticated manner.
In creating a media campaign strategy, there are many dimensions to consider, each with multiple options. For example, designers can choose among 10-15 direct and indirect pathways to be taken, about 30-40 basic persuasive appeals to be selected, perhaps 25-30 different channels to be utilized, 5-10 types of target behaviors to be advocated, 10-15 types of target audiences to be influenced, 10-15 kinds of source messengers to deliver the content, 5-10 types of instructional skills to be taught, and an array of stylistic executions to be created.
A basic theme of this chapter is that disciplined diversification can yield greater success in alcohol campaigns. Rather than putting too many eggs in