3.1 Communications and Outreach Supporting Enforcement
Effective, high-visibility communications and outreach are an essential part of successful safety belt law high-visibility enforcement programs (Solomon et al., 2003, Chapter II). Paid advertising can be a critical part of the media strategy. Paid advertising brings with it the ability to control message content, timing, placement, and repetition (Milano et al., 2004). Use: All high-visibility enforcement programs include communications and outreach strategies that use some combination of earned media (news stories) and paid advertising. Effectiveness: As discussed in Section 2.1, the May 2002 Click It or Ticket campaign evaluation demonstrated the effect of different media strategies. Belt use increased by 8.6 percentage points across 10 States that used paid advertising extensively in their campaigns. Belt use increased by 2.7 percentage points across 4 States that used limited paid advertising and increased by only 0.5 percentage points across 4 States that used no paid advertising (Solomon et al., 2002). Milano et al. (2004) summarize an extensive amount of information from national telephone surveys conducted in conjunction with each national campaign from 1997 through 2003. Costs: As discussed in Chapter 2, Section 2.1, paid advertising can be quite expensive. In the average State, paid advertising costs were about $125,000 for the 2002 campaign and over $400,000 in 2004 (Solomon and Chaffe, in review, Chapter II). Time to implement: An effective media campaign requires four to six months to plan and implement. |
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