And now for something completely different...

[Jester]

Bull. Education is 'drink responsibly'. Education is 'this is your mind on drugs'. Education is fore-brain, it's rational, it's cold. What was done to smoking goes waaaay beyond that. The hatred engendered for smoking (and, incidentally, for smokers -- not many 'hate the sin but not the sinner') goes way beyond. It's lizard brain, it's visceral, it's passionate hatred. It is the mind set of the patriot at war, the zealot at the stake. It's based not on knowledge but on feeling.

Both 'drink responsibly' and 'this is your mind on drugs' are advertising campaigns. They may be ineffective preachy ones, but they're not much in the way of education. I don't know anything more about drugs from watching some guy drop an egg into a frying pan with an ominous voice over. It's trying to scare me off drugs, not rationally convince me, or provide me with techniques and evidence to help me decide.

It sounds to me like you're defining the difference between education and advertising as having to do with the emotional response it elicits. I don't think that's a particularily helpful way to define the difference, but I'm not sure that it even matters much. There is probably enough blur between what's "advertising" vs. "education" in the end. Both are for conveying information.

I think you need to study the effects of advertising.

Perhaps. I've always been relatively cynical about the power of advertising per se. Things that catch on usually do so because various social forces are already lined up behind them. But I could well be wrong about that, it's not necessarily an easy thing to discern.

I think you are thinking billboards and loud TV hucksters. Or even something 'subtle', like product placement. But consider Sesame Street Muppet, Cookie Monster. He has been found to be both a factor in the obesity problem, and after his 'conversion' to better eating in the past decade, he has been found to have influenced the consumption of more fruit by children. And *that* is propaganda done well.

Sesame street, unlike 'this is your brain on drugs', actually is education, alongside entertainment. Cookie monster didn't teach particularily helpful habits before, but if he's up on screen telling kids about how they should eat healthy foods, he's giving them nutritional education. Also, kids are susceptible to indoctrination, which is one of the reasons education can be powerful in this cause. Teach the sons, and especially the daughters, and you catch them while their opinions are still forming. Try showing the parents Cookie Monster, and the effect would likely be much reduced.

The purpose of advertising (why are we using an euphemism -- if it is for political or social change, advertising *is* propaganda) is to define 'downhill'.

... something which is much easier if downhill actually is downhill. Trying to define uphill as downhill is usually pretty tough, no matter how good your advertising is. People don't have kids randomly, it's a big decision. Something major has to change to sway it. Absent anything else, you'd need one *hell* of an advertising campaign to make that happen.

But, of course, the whole debate is somewhat silly. The best campaigns have healthy doses of both good marketing and good education. Dr. Mechai Viravaidya is always my favourite example of a successful contraception campaign. It is interesting to note that many of the countries most in need of a dramatic cut in the birth rate are also the countries worst hit by AIDS.

-Jester