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Public service announcements (PSAs) are frequently used tools to try to change attitudes and behaviors on social issues, including texting and driving, which has been social problem for over a decade. However, the effectiveness of such PSA campaigns often meet with varying degrees of success, suggesting changes to current anti-texting and driving campaigns are needed. This study aims to examine how to design more effective anti-texting and driving PSA campaigns by identifying the elements of existing campaigns that have the strongest impact on attitude change.

In total, 682 respondents from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk participated in an online study in which they evaluated 162 real-world anti-texting and driving ads. Respondents evaluated the ads on various ad elements (i.e. type of appeal, source of emotion, discrete emotions and perceived creativity), as well as their attitudes toward the issue after seeing the ad.

PSAs that use emotional (vs rational) appeals, evoke emotion through imagery (vs text) and/or use fear (vs disgust, anger or guilt) result in the largest changes in attitude. In addition, more creative PSAs are more effective at changing attitudes.

Overall, the results provide useful information to social marketers on how to design more effective anti-texting and driving campaigns.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of ad message framing (self-benefit vs other-benefit messages) and perceived consumer effectiveness (PCE) on green advertising effectiveness.

The conceptual framework was borrowed from self-congruity theory and was tested with two between-subject design experiments; PCE was measured in the first study and manipulated in the second.

The findings show that both measured and primed PCE (low vs high) moderate the impact of a green ad’s message framing on consumer responses (i.e. attitude toward the brand and purchase intention). Specifically, an other-benefit message is more effective when consumers perceive that their individual actions can positively influence environmental issues (high PCE). In contrast, a self-benefit message is more effective when consumers perceive that their individual actions might not be enough to influence environmental issues (low PCE). This research also shows that the influence of message framing on consumer responses is mediated by the perceived social responsibility of the company.

This paper offers an outline for designing effective ad campaigns for green products. Managers can determine or manipulate the PCE level of their target market and frame the message in their ad campaign accordingly, which will positively drive perceived social responsibility and, in turn, the ad campaign’s effectiveness.

This paper contributes to both the green advertising and self-congruity literature by showing the moderating effect of PCE on the effectiveness of message framing in green advertising.