Messages with a meaning

Tzivia Schwartz-Getzug leans forward, listening hard to a message from the U.S. government. On the screen in front of her, a man is walking his dog when the dog pulls away to investigate a lumpy parcel under a tree. “Leave it,” his master tells him. “It’s just an old double chin. Someone probably lost it playing here in the park with their kids.”

“Oh my God, that is hysterical!” says the Los Angeles mother of three. “Very clever.”

Schwartz-Getzug likes the “selling idea” of the government’s new campaign to get Americans fit: that taking just a few small steps to improve diet and boost exercise can make people healthier, slimmer, even sexier. But will she – and millions of other Americans – buy the message?

This time, they might because the sellers have come prepared. Flushed with success from the anti-tobacco wars, they know more about the American people – and how to influence them. And this time, the sellers are joining forces.

In the last 18 months, the federal government, health advocates and private companies have begun to merge their efforts against fat and inactivity. The Department of Health and Human Services has turned to a top Madison Avenue advertising company and a leading Internet design company to create the Small Steps campaign. Media companies are rethinking their long-standing practice of marketing junk food to kids. And health advocacy organizations such as the American Heart Association are forming partnerships with companies willing to spread their message to a seen-it-all, heard-it-all American public.

“Very few behaviors change because someone saw an ad. You need social norms in place, environmental supports, the products, the placement, all the things that make the right decisions easy,” says Carol Schechter, director of health communications for the Academy for Educational Development, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization.

Thus far, campaigns aimed at selling healthy behavior have persuaded Americans, in large part, to wear seat belts, quit smoking and refrain from drinking alcohol and driving.

But consider the 22.5 percent of Americans who smoke, the 18 percent who never wear seat belts and the 17,000 killed each year by drunken drivers, and one understands the limits of health campaigns. Listen to Americans, including Schwartz-Getzug, talk about the crush of demands upon them, and the temptations they face daily, and one perceives a sobering truth: Marketing campaigns aimed at changing behavior face long odds.

A full-time community-relations specialist with the U.S. Jewish Federation and mother of three kids ages 5 to 13, Schwartz-Getzug can’t fathom how she could find time to get to the park, much less play with her kids there. Besides, she says, “I’m not convinced that those little steps actually have an impact. … Taking the stairs certainly does something, but it doesn’t replace what’s really needed.”

She’s what New York advertising giant McCann-Erickson Worldwide calls a “jaded can’t-doer” – a parent too busy to eat right and exercise and too discouraged to launch a lifestyle overhaul. Not all Americans have grown overweight or suffer the health consequences of inactivity, but many share Schwartz-Getzug’s personal assessment.

“I’m still relatively healthy,” she says. “But I’m not in very good shape, and I don’t feel very good.”

A walk after dinner sounds nice, she says, but by then, it’s time to get the kids to bed. The 30 minutes of exercise a day recommended as the minimum for a healthy lifestyle? “I’m always trying to figure out where to find that, and it always comes down to less sleep,” she says.

It’s clear that the straightforward approach to changing Americans’ behavior will no longer work. Simply gathering the evidence, donning the white coat, warning the public and recommending a course of action won’t cut it.

Today, campaigns to prevent HIV and AIDS, discourage smoking, fight obesity and urge cancer screenings use humor, sex and sophisticated market research. Public health advocates segment their markets and tailor their pitches to the sensibilities and media consumption habits of particular groups – preschoolers, teens, Latinos, blacks, parents of school-age kids. They push fitness and health using one of the advertising profession’s oldest principles: Sell the sizzle, not the steak.

These new campaigns offer encouragement by instant message, downloadable cell phone games with disease-prevention ideas, reality shows, Web sites with attitude and information, and potty humor for kids.

In vintage newsreel style, the Nickelodeon channel details the not-so-fine points of flatulence as part of a new campaign aimed at getting kids to link what they eat to how their bodies perform. The federal government’s Small Steps campaign features sexy soccer moms and a paunchy man whose healthy choices have transformed him into a buff daddy.

John Riley, president of Metrix Inc., a Rochester, N.Y., marketing company, says Americans respond to messages that emphasize social acceptance and status – not scare tactics or lectures.

“We need to push that emotional button that’s going to get them to pay attention with their whole body and not just with their mind,” says Riley, a former New York public health official.

“Human beings are very complicated, and there are a lot of interesting barriers we set up (to justify behaviors that aren’t in our best interests),” says Peggy Conlon, president and chief executive of the U.S. Ad Council. “The key to advertising is not to bash them down with a battering ram but to coax out the positive behaviors.” Often ads do that by appealing to some other deeply felt need – an obligation to children, perhaps, or a desire to be sexy, admired or envied.

In March 2004, the federal government kicked off its Small Steps campaign, with pro bono help of McCann-Erickson Worldwide and the Web site-development company Carton Donofrio Partners Inc. It is aimed primarily at “family builders” – parents 25 to 49 with children younger than 18 living at home. About 38 percent of American households have at least one, and it’s a group that spans race, ethnicity and marital status.

Diverse as this group is, however, it shares a single trait: Like Schwartz-Getzug, time for people in this group is almost entirely spoken for by the demands of work, home and kids. Although healthy eating and exercise is on their to-do lists, it often remains undone.

Working under the advertising industry group the Ad Council, McCann-Erickson has produced more than a dozen advertisements for television, radio, print media, billboards and buses. Media outlets have donated more than $150 million worth of air time and ad space to run the campaign ads.

An estimated 105 million Americans have seen the ads, and 1.2 million people have logged on to the Small Steps Web site – a “conversion rate … anyone in commercial advertising would love,” says the Ad Council’s Conlon.

Last month, an eminent panel of scientists urged the food, restaurant and marketing industries to launch a “massive social marketing campaign” aimed at shifting the food choices of American kids from junk food to healthier fare.

Nickelodeon was among the first companies to volunteer for that campaign. In October, Nickelodeon announced it had joined the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation to create the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. The three will combine forces to launch a comprehensive education and advertising campaign aimed at getting kids to eat right and exercise more.

But if that is to happen, parents such as Schwartz-Getzug also must get on board and lead by example, experts say. Some of those parents will be nudged to action by the lure of losing double chins, or love handles or spare tires – all unwanted body parts portrayed as lost in the government’s new campaign. Others might be prodded into action by their kids.

But in homes such as Schwartz-Getzug’s, even this two-pronged approach is facing the powerful forces of inertia.

Recently Schwartz-Getzug overheard one of the “Let’s Just Play” messages on TV and, despite a to-do list a mile long, suggested a family outing.

“Yeah, OK, Mom, as soon as this show is over,” the kids replied.