Reflections on public health information campaigns

The COVID19 crisis caused me to reflect on previous health crises where public health information campaigns took on such huge importance. In the early 1980s the HIV/AIDS virus was discovered. As now, panic gripped the world. Experts predicted 400000 deaths in New York alone. In the absence of information imagination ran riot as people pictured the ravages that the virus would inflict on the human body. AIDS was the apparently symptomless, invisible killer. The communication challenge was to show the public that there was no way of knowing whether someone had the HIV virus despite what their worst fears might say. The caption read "If this woman had the virus which leads to AIDS in a few years time she could look like the person over the page".

You turned the page, anticipating the horrors you would find:

The image is the same and the caption reads "Worrying isnt it". Multiple persuasion techniques contribute to the ad's effectiveness: fear, irony, repetition and juxtaposition. It plays also on the before-and -after genre of advertising popular at the time for many consumer goods such as laundry detergent. The ad was created by BMP DDB Needham who (in an entirely different genre brought us the unforgettable Cadbury's Smash aliens