NIH Research Radio and Anti-Smoking PSAs

For anyone out there who doesn't currently subscribe to NIH Research Radio, you might want to check out the podcast.

I was listening to the latest episode this morning while making some coffee, and the most interesting story (for me) was about low-involvement and high-involvement anti-smoking PSAs. The research discussed found that people remember the lower-involvement PSAs better, because they're being processed in a more rational way. This isn't necessarily surprising, but it does point to two competing priorities - rational processing vs. the need to create a message that cuts through the advertising clutter to get people's attention.

I know I've worked on projects where participants' responses to what I would consider lower-involvement PSAs is that they're boring - they want to be scared. They remember posters and things designed to scare people about sexually transmitted infections, and they think that all PSAs should engage/frighten them that way. What does that mean for blending formative research ("Scare us!") with findings like those discussed in the podcast? I think it means people need to do a good job mixing primary research and the literature - perhaps not a surprise, but probably harder to accomplish in practice than we'd prefer.