Communication Strategy Analysis of COVID-19 Pandemic’s Public Service Announcement (PSA) Production

Communication through media is one of the most important aspects if a country faces a health crisis such as a pandemic. One of the mediums that are often used is via the production of public service announcements or PSA. PSA is a short video lasting between 30 to 120 seconds, communicating to large-scale audiences for social behaviour changes. However, certain PSA will be considered a failure if the audience ignores or does not understand the message. When Malaysia faces a health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the PSA barely emphasises the aspects of behavioural balance, message recall, and the aesthetic of message presentation. Thus, this paper aims to discuss the mode of presentation and styles in 30 public service announcements related to COVID-19 in MyHealth’s YouTube channel under the Ministry of Health Malaysia (MOH) from January to June 2020. The preliminary finding shows that most PSAs used 2D animation production techniques by representing the real scenarios and situations faced by the Malaysian to facilitate the audience's understanding of the message. Overall, PSA's presentation style on COVID-19 in Malaysia emphasises the balance between the importance of message and communication strategy with five phases in the theory of audience behavioural change. Keywords: Public service announcement, media production, crisis communication, pandemic, COVID-19.

APPLYING THE ELABORATION LIKELIHOOD MODEL TO ANALYZE THE EFFECTS OF DEPRESSION PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENTS AMONG MALAYSIAN COLLEGE STUDENTS

As depression became an increasing contributor to the global disease burden, there is a demand for the public to understand depression disorder and reduce stigmatized attitudes about it. Especially, the prevalence of depression among college students is extremely higher than the general population; thus, it is essential to study among college students. Specifically, the utilizing of the health Public Service Announcement (PSA) is aiming to raise public awareness about health issues. Thus, this study emphasized on Depression Public Service Announcement and its effectiveness. By utilizing the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), this study examined the consequences of the dual-process method towards stigmatized attitude changes about depression among students at a Malaysian public university. Cluster sampling technique was used to select respondents and a total of 185 respondents participated in two groups of experiments. Respondents in each group were exposed to two different D-PSAs with either high-quality depression messages or low-quality depression messages. Attributional Questionnaire (AQ) was adapted to measure respondents’ attitudes toward depression, and a set of questionnaires based on Reynolds’s study was applied to evaluate the information processing approach used. Lastly, the results demonstrated that D-PSA with a high-quality message elicits higher elaboration of respondents and less stigmatized attitudes. Conversely, D-PSA with low-quality messages elicits lower elaboration and more stigmatized attitudes about depression.

News Releases and Public Service Announcements

This publication about news release and public service announcement writing is the third of a four-part series on media relations. This series also covers media relations strategies, working with the media, and media interview skills. This is a revision with Lisa Lundy of the following original publication: Telg, Ricky. 2011. “News Releases and Public Service Announcements”. EDIS 2011 (8). https://doi.org/10.32473/edis-wc113-2011.

Developing Public Service Announcements to Help Prevent Suicide among Young People

Background: Suicide is the leading cause of death among young people in Australia. Media campaigns have the potential to reach a broad audience, change attitudes and behaviours, and, ultimately, help prevent suicide. Little is known about the type of content or format suicide prevention media message should take to help prevent suicide among young people. Objective: the objective of this study was to involve young people aged 18 to 24 years in developing three suicide prevention public service announcement (PSAs) targeting young people at risk of suicide appropriate for testing in a randomised controlled trial (RCT). Method: fifteen young people attended at least one of four workshops in Melbourne, Australia. The workshops focused on exploring the appropriateness of three key suicide prevention media PSAs: “Talk to someone”, “Find what works for you”, and “Life can get better”. Young people also provided input into message content, format, and design. Results: participants perceived that all three suicide prevention PSAs were useful and helpful. Participants were concerned that the PSAs may not be suitable for nonwestern cultural groups, could trivialise psychological suffering, and that the actions they promoted could seem distant or unattainable to young people at risk. The featuring of young people, especially young people with hopeful narratives of how they overcame a suicidal crisis, was considered to be an important characteristic of suicide prevention PSAs targeting young people. Conclusions: Developing suicide prevention PSAs with young people is rare but essential to better understand young people’s needs and improve the quality of suicide prevention media PSAs. Further research is needed to evaluate the impact of suicide prevention PSAs developed by young people, for young people.

RACISM MITIGATION AMONG MALAYSIANS THROUGH THE APPLICATION OF PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENTS (PSAs)

Public Service Announcement (PSAs) works as medium of communication to mass ranged of audience. In fact, PSAs have been utilized as a mechanism of informing and educating society on social cases and promotes behavioral changes. Roehm (2018) and Jolani et al.(2017) both indicate PSAs is a tool to educate people with the intention to urge positive action whilst increasing awareness level of the audiences on the highlighted issues. The social issues of racism in Malaysia still occurred even after celebrating it’s 62nd independence. As a multiracial and multicultural country, racism is a threat than can gives negative impact to the country’s national security, harmony and racial unity. Hence this study is to explore and discuss on Public Service Announcement (PSAs) and its applications to mitigate racism among Malaysians. The aim of this study is to propose a guideline on designing an impactful PSAs in order to cater social issues such as racism in Malaysia. This research will contribute as an additional knowledge for advertising agencies, designers and academic syllabus.

Getting the Message Across: Examining Malaysia’s Covid-19 Public Service Announcement (PSA) Infographics

The current COVID-19 pandemic has become an unprecedented public health crisis and there is much ongoing research investigating its wide-ranging impacts on all areas of society and people's everyday lives. This article presents preliminary findings of an ongoing study that inquires into Malaysia's COVID-19 public service announcement (PSA) infographics and how they convey much-needed information to the general public during the pandemic period. Drawing upon research on infographics in healthcare and health risk communication, the article examines COVID-19 PSA infographics that have been produced in Malaysia and the ways they achieve what they are designed to do. The findings show that the infographics 1) are numerous and mostly presented in the informational and process-based types, 2) cover various topics related to the information on the novel virus, its risks, and recommended preventive and control measures, 3) possess key components of infographic and (4) adopt a three-way process of engaging the target audience. The findings also reveal several key points worth considering in thinking about the infographics, including whether they communicate the right message to the right audience at the right time and whether they are designed according to the principles of message design in health risk communication.

PUPPET MOVEMENTS IN STRUCTURE-SPECIFIC TRADITIONAL PAPER CUT OUT ANIMATION PRODUCTION

Physical paper puppets are inanimate objects, but when we’re speaking in terms of the production of traditional paper cut out animation, they become the actors and the souls that drive the movie. When shooting and animating traditional paper cut out animation, the puppets are laid flat on a surface so they can only move in limited directions compared to conventional 2D or 3D animation. As we know, each character in animated movie has its own personality and unique to each other. The challenge lays in bringing out the characteristics and personality of the character through the limited medium of paper puppet. In this qualitative research, puppet movements will be applied to quadruped cat characters in a public service announcement titled “Spay & Neuter”. The puppet along with the visual design, segmentations, and joints were done in previous research. Qualitative observations and audio-visual materials are used to collect the data for references. Literature review will study the characteristics of cats, body language, behaviour, and principles of animation especially timing and exaggeration. Observation is conducted by studying the movements of real cats from online videos and direct observations and also studying how other animators animate cat characters in animated films. In the exploration stage, paper puppets will be animated according to the movement design while experimenting with the timing and frame rate of the stop motion to achieve the final results.

Public Service Announcements for Health Insurance in Nepal: Perspectives from Health Belief Model

Public Service Announcement (PSA) is an advertisement to inform the people sponsored by the public company or the governmental agencies. There were several PSAs implemented to inform the people about health insurance (HI). Data from the Health Insurance Board showed low enrolment with high dropout in health insurance programme (HIP). It was found that the PSAs could not attract the people. Therefore, we assessed the PSAs used for the HIP and amomg them, three Radio/FM jingles, eight TV spots, hoarding board, newspapers, and brochure were evaluated using the Health Belief Model (HBM). We found the almost all PSAs have not covered the constructs of HBM. Most of the PSAs have included primarily perceived benefits and perceived susceptibility but missed to include perceived severity, perceived threats, and self-efficacy. Only benefits focused message could not attract the people. Therefore, we recommend that all PSAs need to have all the features of HBM in the PSA messages while notifying and informing the people.