Ethical Fridays! Hand out

Public Service Announcements

What does a PSA stand for?

P: Public
S: Service
A: Announcement

 What does it mean?
When you use advertising on the radio, television, magazines, and etc. for the public interest. PSAs are intended to raise awareness directed to the public about different social and global issues.

History

The oldest PSA’s are when we didn’t have technology. Horns, town criers, church
bells and word of mouth were used to inform PSA. We still do that today, how we inform our friends and family about issues around the world to create awareness about a certain issue.

 How to get an Ad Council Scholarship for an Issue you feel strongly about:

  • The sponsor organization has to be a private non-profit organization.
  • The issue has to be serious. The media wouldn’t waste time or space on what isn’t a huge issue.
  •  The issue must address the Ad Council’s focus on Health & Safety, Education, or Community.
  • The issue must offer a solution through an individual action.
  • The issue must be non-commercial, non-denominational, non-partisan, and not be designated to influence legislation.

New Technologies Changing Public Service Announcements

(examples of a few websites that changed PSAs in a big way)

  • Facebook was huge. The event option to invite all of your friends to a PSE event brought notifications to people if their friends were attending the event and it had information where it was taking place, why it was taking place, pictures, videos, information, and more.
  •  YouTube had a turn-the-light-switches-off option for the Earth Hour to create awareness about how we should turn off the lights and all electronics in our house for one hour to save the environment in a big way as a whole.
  • WordPress has a thing where you connect twitter with it and it shows all of the events that would notify you.

Ethical Issues:

  • Not all money from organizations goes to the needy. Especially the bigger mainstream companies such as UNICEF or the Canadian Red Cross because there are employers working for that company
  • Fraud is also common and that is a serious ethical issue.

Work cited:

“Public Service Advertising | Advertising & Society Review 7:2.” Project MUSE. Web. 28 Apr. 2011. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asr/v007/7.2unit06.html&gt;.

“Ad Council Retrospective – Case Histories.” Advertising Educational Foundation – Educational Advertising Resources – AEF. Web. 29 Apr. 2011. <http://www.aef.com/exhibits/social_responsibility/ad_council/2148&gt;.