Getting PSAs on the Air

Content: PSAs should not be written with the same hard-sell tone that most commercials have. Subtle differences in the way a spot is scripted can affect the likelihood it will be selected for free airtime. For instance, stations are much less likely to use PSAs that directly ask for donations than ones that give the audience information. The most effective "fundraising" spots may be ones that refer to contributions only obliquely.

Lengths: Many organizations make the error of producing a set of spots with a variety of subject approaches, all the same length or two lengths, an approach often used in paid campaigns. Unfortunately, when public service directors receive such PSAs, they tend to select one or two for broadcast and discard the rest. We recommend producing the same basic message in most of the standard lengths for radio and TV PSAs: 60, 30, 20, 15 and 10 seconds. The shorter lengths can be "lifted" from the longest length or produced at the same time at modest cost, compared with producing very different spots of the same length. When stations get this package, they are likely to accept more spots in the campaign and give them more plays overall, particularly in prime viewing hours. Sixty- and thirty-second spots get more plays than the shorter lengths, but the latter get more of their play in prime time and other high-viewership periods. Some stations air PSAs in a way that relates length to time of play, for example placing one length in their early news show and another in the late news show. Supplying both lengths allows a campaign to be seen by the people who watch only one of these shows.

These advantages provide what is sought by successful paid campaigns: frequency (the number of times people see it) and reach (the number of different people who see it).

Positioning: PCS knows from experience that it's not only the content of a PSA, but all elements of its distribution package working in concert that motivate public service directors to put a spot on their air. We help develop a convincing cover letter that succinctly states the case for airing a PSA. We pay attention to seemingly minor concerns like the title of the spot and background material to amplify the points made in the cover letter. We can assign a standard commercial number that many broadcasters use to manage PSAs in their computer systems.

Choosing outlets: The vast number of outlets for PSAs presents specific challenges.
- Some noncommercial television and radio stations air PSAs, some don't.
- Some outlets use PSAs only in Spanish, some use both English and Spanish.
- Some television and radio stations are "satellites," repeating the programming of other stations, which are the ones to which PSAs must be sent. And often a group of radio stations in a market are owned by the same company and share a public service director.
- There are thousands of cable systems, but almost 90% have fewer than 10,000 subscribing households.

Your campaign can stand on the shoulders of many others.
We know if outlets don't use outside PSAs and we look at their use of PSAs we distributed previously. In the case of broadcast television, this is based on electronic monitoring of hundreds of thousands of plays, which enables us to set such criteria as "most plays of 60- and 30-second spots between 8 a.m. and midnight." Audience figures can be balanced with track records to seek highest total viewership. Choosing cable systems, we can limit consideration to the 10% of systems that have 80% of the country's subscribers.

Evaluating Success
For television PSAs, we track with the SIGMA system that we helped A.C. Nielsen develop for electronically monitoring PSAs. This system gives us the station, date and time of each play. Dubs for distribution directly to stations can be given one code, dubs for local offices of an organization to carry to stations another, and dubs for tapes given to networks still another. Then, monitored plays can be separated as to source.

Our early involvement in SIGMA's development helped us to understand the system's many advantages, and its limitations. We realized that monitoring was only the first step in analyzing exposure of TV PSAs, and began developing our own computer programs to refine and present the data, years before it was offered to other distributors. For example, because a single PSA play is counted as multiple plays when reception of the electronic code is interrupted, SIGMA data can have a lot of duplicates. We created programs to delete these duplicate plays. It is not unusual for a widely distributed campaign to accumulate more than 10,000 monitored plays, making it difficult to "see the forest for the trees." Our computer programs summarize the data, presenting it in easy-to-read listings, tables and charts, including:
- Listings of all networks and stations that aired the campaign with station call letters, channel, network affiliation and market rank, as well as the dollar value and "viewer impressions" achieved by plays to date.
- Tables summarizing the number of markets, outlets, telecasts, broadcast hours, "viewer impressions" and commercial dollar value of each spot, and total for the campaign.
- Tables and graphs of monitored plays for each hour of the day or each day of the week, number of stations or number of plays by market rank and network affiliation. We can prepare graphs that show plays per week for every week of the campaign.

Any organization that, directly or through a producer or agency, has relied on PCS usually becomes aware of the critical difference long-term specialization in PSA placement can make, and concludes that they cannot afford to put placement of spots in which they have invested a great deal of resources and expectations into less experienced hands. For these same reasons, many organizations without an agency or producer choose PCS to produce their campaigns.