Ads Aim at Making Some Social Change

Los Angeles-area residents are about to face an onslaught of advertising that doesn’t ask us to buy a thing. But the ads are going to ask us to change our lifestyles.

Rebuild L.A. will begin to broadcast public service spots this week with the theme line, “Our L.A.,” featuring compelling interviews with residents groping for answers to the city’s racial tensions. Spots aimed at persuading Californians not to smoke will begin to air this week. And a slew of ads urging Los Angeles commuters to share rides has just kicked off.

Advertising can persuade people to do a lot of dumb things--such as smoking, drinking and eating too much. But if advertising can help make people do the things that aren’t good for them, can it also coax consumers to do good things? Advertising executives insist it can. And what happens in Los Angeles over the next few months as a result of these three campaigns may provide further proof that advertising can sell ideas as well as it sells products.

“If we believe that advertising can have so much influence in its promotion of conspicuous consumption, then the reverse should also be true,” said Barry Glassner, chairman of the Sociology Department at USC. “If advertising is so powerful at creating harm, then it ought to be just as powerful at creating good.”

Because so many public service-type messages compete for consumer attention--from AIDS awareness to environmental concern to the plight of the homeless--advertising experts say it’s a tall order to actually influence consumer behavior.

But the constant repetition of some ads--such as the $1 million a day in donated ad time and space for the national campaign of Partnership for a Drug-Free America--can eventually take hold.

“Advertising alone is not enough,” said Allison Cohen, founder of PeopleTalk, a New York consulting firm. “But if the stakes are high enough--and if there are events planned around the campaign that make it look bigger than it really is--these messages will eventually get into your head.”

Just one week before the civil rights trial for the police officers accused of beating Rodney King is scheduled to begin, Rebuild L.A. will start broadcasting TV and radio spots based on interviews with area residents and business owners who want to see a better Los Angeles. Those interviewed offer a myriad of ways to improve race relations in Los Angeles, including one resident who simply suggests, “We’ve got to learn one another.”

The interviews were originally meant to be research for future Rebuild L.A. ads. But director Robert Bermeo of Mastrippolito Films found the interviews to be so powerful that he pressed the group to run them as public service spots.

“They are not sound bites,” said Bermeo, who volunteered several hundred hours of his time to film the ads. “They are a chance for people to speak who rarely get to speak.” Filmed in English, Spanish and Korean, most spots also feature closing voice-overs by actor Edward James Olmos, in which he says, “Our L.A.”

“We’re not trying to sell anything except understanding,” said Dennis Holt, chief executive of Western International Media and chairman of the Rebuild L.A. Media/Communications Task Force. “Advertising can be a mirror. You get back what you give out.”

The spots show Los Angeles residents that Rebuild L.A. “has a relationship not just with government and with corporations--but also with people in the community,” said J. Melvin Muse, chairman of the agency Muse Cordero Chen and creative director of the spots. Muse said the task force will continue to conduct hundreds of interviews, and he hopes to have more than 1,000 interviews on tape by the end of the year.

But Californians aren’t just being asked to get along with each other. A flood of new spots is also about to prod some of us to stop smoking.

Next week, a new $16-million ad campaign aimed at persuading women and children--the prime targets in cigarette advertising--not to smoke will begin airing statewide. The big tobacco companies have every reason to dread it. A study released last week revealed that while the state’s previous anti-smoking campaign aired in 1990 and 1991, cigarette consumption fell at a rate three times greater than in 1992--when the ads weren’t broadcast.

“When you’re dealing with a heavily advertised, anti-health product like cigarettes, the counter-advertising is critical,” said Stanton A. Glantz, author of the study who is a professor at the University of San Francisco. “These ad campaigns make the tobacco companies go berserk.”

Executives say the ads will use humor to get across their message. “We’ll try to emphasize that the glamorous aspects of tobacco advertising are a fraud,” said Jacquolyn Duerr, chief of the media campaign for the California Department of Health Services’ tobacco control section.

Although California has run anti-smoking ads previously, Minnesota was the first state to fund a campaign aimed at snuffing out smoking. That campaign raised national interest last year--especially among women--when it aired a spot that showed a glamorous model from a tobacco billboard who comes to life and snuffs out her cigarette on the head of a tobacco executive.

That ad was viewed by women as something more than an anti-tobacco message, said Kathy Harty, manager of the section for nonsmoking and health at the Minnesota Department of Health. “Women told us they also saw the ad as a message of empowerment.”

Empowerment in Los Angeles is too often measured in car machismo. To change that, commuters are just beginning to hear a massive ad campaign advising them to share rides on Thursdays.

Caltrans and the Air Quality Management District are testing a $4-million ride-share ad campaign in the Los Angeles market--trying to coax just 5% of the 5 million commuters who drive alone to work to car-pool once weekly. If the campaign has impact here, it will go statewide.

“The single most important thing is to get people to take personal responsibility,” said Bob Kresser, chairman of the Santa Monica agency Kresser/Craig, which created the campaign. “It isn’t the cars that are causing the congestion. It’s the people who are driving them.”

So, instead of focusing on cars, the ads focus on drivers. And the ads have a call to action. They ask people to share rides on Thursdays--then enjoy the benefits of getting to work about 50% faster. What’s more, the ad promises that if you’d only share rides, “you’d be a happier person.”

Briefly . . .

Several Los Angeles agencies are being interviewed for the $18-million Porsche Cars North America ad business that recently went into review. . . . The Los Angeles agency Sacks/Fuller Advertising has won the ad accounts for Los Angeles-based Discount Tire Center and Irvine-based Honey Baked Hams. . . . I.T.S. Corp., a San Diego-based information technology services firm, has selected San Diego-based Conlee & Butler for marketing support. . . . Livingston, Calif.-based Foster Farms has placed its $4-million account up for review and excluded Venice-based incumbent Chiat/Day. . . . The Advertising Club of Los Angeles will host a “Super Bowl” luncheon at noon Wednesday at the Beverly Hilton featuring sportscasters O.J. Simpson, Jim Lampley, Bob Trumpy and Fred Roggin.