Ad Plan: Your Tax Dollars on Drugs

Barry R. McCaffrey--war hero, retired general, top drug official--has never worked on Madison Avenue. But with perfect faith in the power of advertising, he is sure that he can make “No, that stuff’s for losers” and “Happy Heroin Hints” as familiar to America’s youth as Nike’s “Just do it.”

His project, launched with great fanfare last month by President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), is no ordinary advertising blitz, at least not for the government.

Not only will the ad campaign drill a message of drug abstinence into preteens, adolescents and the grown-ups who guide them, but it will cost $1 billion in federal funds for media time and space that used to come free.

Like public-service announcements going back to Smokey Bear, anti-drug ads until now had been made and shown by joint charitable ventures between advertising agencies and the media. But McCaffrey will wield a budget of $200 million each year for five years, an amount rivaling the largest corporate ad accounts.

In many quarters the turnabout spells trouble. The new approach fuels fears that the government is overspending in a big way and raises doubts about whether paid public-service campaigns are any more effective than donated ones. And infusing money into a voluntary process has provoked, as cash will do, a frenzy of anger, sniping and extended palms.

Some critics charge that the McCaffrey plan basically is unfair. The government now is paying astronomical sums to politically influential broadcast companies that have curtailed anti-drug public service announcements, while the advertising industry is expected to continue donating time and skills worth millions of dollars.

And marketing experts predict that the advent of a paid anti-drug campaign could pressure other government agencies to underwrite messages on teen pregnancy, literacy, AIDS and the like.

“The networks are going to be the big beneficiaries,” complained Jeffrey Hon, spokesman for the Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence.

Broadcasters should be forced to show the ads in prime time without charging a penny, argues Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. After all, they use the people’s airwaves. Hundt fought McCaffrey hard on that point last year when he still held his FCC position, but he lost.

“It’s a shame,” Hundt said. “The public shouldn’t have to be in the position where it has to buy the right to use its own medium.”

One thing is clear: Once the federal treasury is pried open, “you can’t go back,” McCaffrey conceded in an interview.

Despite the magnitude of the precedent, McCaffrey’s office so far has refused to release the government’s spending plan, claiming that disclosing commitments for federal expenditures could put negotiations with broadcasters in jeopardy.

McCaffrey acknowledges the vein of greed he has tapped and the ensuing criticism. Still, he remains convinced that the ads “will work” and that they will be worth every taxpayer dollar.

Small Portion of Agency’s Budget

The ad campaign accounts for a little more than 1% of the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s annual $16.8-billion budget, McCaffrey notes. He said it is necessary because “behavior follows attitude.”

Broadcast outlets, pressing for profit in an age of mergers and deregulation, in recent years largely have consigned their public service ads to time slots in the wee hours--not the most effective way to reach middle-schoolers. The government’s new advertising offensive calls for using 75% of the media budget to reach the masses through broadcast stations.

McCaffrey also wants to pinpoint where and when the ads run--mostly in prime time.

“My motto is ‘Frequently wrong, but never in doubt,’ ” McCaffrey says with a grin. “I am confident we know what we’re doing. . . . I’d be surprised at the end of the year if we don’t see a significant impact.”

McCaffrey aims, by 2002, to reduce youth drug use by 20%. For the ad campaign specifically, he hopes to double the number of anti-drug messages on television and persuade more of the nation’s youngsters that regular use of drugs is harmful.

In theory, under the new order, the media is expected to match government purchases with their own donations for announcements about drugs and related causes.

What is asked of television and radio--to match about $139 million to be spent this year--is $81 million below the value of anti-drug time given last year, before federal payments appeared on the scene as leverage.

Yet even supporters of the new program say there is no guarantee that the requested level of cooperation will materialize. The media “are under no legal obligation to provide a match,” says Rich Hamilton, chief executive officer of Zenith USA, one of the government’s media buyers.

Hamilton says he has commitments of a “100% dollar-for-dollar match” for $100 million in purchase agreements so far.

The largest deal to date, according to sources familiar with the program, is a $50-million package with Disney/ABC that also includes ESPN. The accompanying matches are not all straight gifts of time. Credit is also awarded, for example, for building an Internet site.

Fox Family Network may count as donations episodes of its entertainment programs that carry an anti-drug theme, according to Alan Levitt, a senior advisor to McCaffrey. McCaffrey traveled to Los Angeles earlier this month to address about 60 Fox writers and producers.

Already one major network, NBC, has balked at handing over free slots in the most prized nighttime hours. Last month the government bought 30 seconds during “Seinfeld” anyway.

McCaffrey’s belief in TV advertising rests on memory. Cue up this chorus in the background, to a bouncy beat: “Be . . . all that you can be.”

After his service in Vietnam, McCaffrey helped the military switch from the draft to volunteers. He noticed that the Army’s foray into advertising attracted much better recruits.

‘Just Say No’ Plea Gives Rise to Ad Idea

Free anti-drug ads have had a different history. In 1987, in the wake of First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” appeal, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, an ad agency group, was established to create messages, gratis, to drive home the point.

One result was the well-remembered commercial showing an egg in its shell, while an announcer explained: “This is your brain.” The egg was cracked and dropped into a frying pan, where it broke apart and sizzled, underscored by the punch line: “This is your brain on drugs.”

Yet in the late 1980s, when adolescent drug use was at its lowest, the donated TV advertising was valued only at $155 million.

In 1991, as gifts to the partnership reached a peak of $370 million, youth drug use also began rising.

The slippage in media donations began the next year--the same year candidate Clinton said he “didn’t inhale” when he smoked marijuana in graduate school.

After Clinton’s election victory, partnership representatives told the president and his wife of their plight. Sympathetic, the first couple taped a public-service announcement. The president made a solo spot too.

But Clinton showed no enthusiasm for spending tax dollars. Half-way through his first term, former New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo relayed, through a Clinton aide, an ambitious idea to pay $1 billion a year. The answer, Cuomo recalled, came back: No. Too pricey.

Instead, the Clintons resurrected a tradition of predecessor George Bush: a White House reception thanking media contributors to the partnership.

Drug Use Became 1996 Campaign Issue

In 1996, the increase in youth drug use became an issue in Clinton’s reelection campaign as the level of media donations kept drifting downward. It was also hard to tell how many people actually saw the ads sent by networks to their affiliates. Local television stations often preempted the spots for money-making commercials from local merchants.

So McCaffrey’s revival of the paid-ad concept came when the administration was especially open to high-profile ways to fight drugs. The drug war director brought the president on board--even though Clinton also called publicly on broadcasters to earn their right to the airwaves.

Hundt rushed to beg McCaffrey to back off, to help him force broadcasters to air one minute of free public-service ads during prime time each night. Or, Hundt suggested, the government could “auction off the licenses” and use the proceeds to fund social-issue campaigns.

“Wouldn’t it be a lot better,” Hundt recalls asking the general, “if we both sallied forth together?”

McCaffrey resisted, saying he could not delay while 7,000 children each day tried drugs for the first time. He knew that doing it Hundt’s way would bring fierce opposition from broadcasters.

“The government should not be telling us what to run and when to run it,” says National Assn. of Broadcasters spokesman John Ernhardt.

Last year’s allocation of $195 million--approved as part of a larger spending bill--divided both conservatives and liberals. Spontaneous outbursts still erupt over the legislation.

Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.) berated McCaffrey’s deputy director at a hearing last month. He wants networks to set aside 5% of prime-time commercials for free anti-drug spots.

On a recent trip to Baltimore to talk about AIDS, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), brought up the subject, too. She said of the new ads: “They leave us cold.”

Meanwhile, ad industry figures ask what happened to their fair share. Graham Turner, a New York creative director, says he charged nothing for a pair of commercials for which he would have billed a client $800,000.

“Yeah, well, now that money’s into the picture, why aren’t we being paid?” Turner asks. “Why should we do it for free?”

A whole new class now lingers by the money pot. “The milk carton people . . , the videotape box people, the laser light shows” are deluging McCaffrey’s office with their own proposals, Levitt says. They all want a fee, of course.

What does the government get in return?

Children in the Washington area, where ads have been running since January as part of a pre-campaign test, can already recite the dialogue.

On her 12th birthday, in her parents’ ice cream store in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Md., Maria Nedostupenko recalled one of the ads. A youngster, offered a joint, worries about the social repercussions of declining--and is relieved to discover that his buddies do not particularly care.

“But the other guy’s smoking [marijuana], so he might be cool,” she notes.

Children might not realize--or want to admit--the influence of advertisements. But just north of here on the second floor of an unobtrusive concrete mid-rise in Rockville, Md., response is being measured differently.

The building is home base for the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information, which is at the other end of the line when callers dial the 800 number that closes the new commercials.

Hot-Line Volume Jumps 220%

In the campaign’s first two weeks, the clearinghouse received 21,000 calls--with a daily average up 220% over the same period last year. The volume is roughly comparable to the 50,000 calls a month that come to the clearinghouse on a separate line dedicated to Wally Bear--a cartoon creature whose anti-drug message is featured on food-tray liners in school cafeterias, said Lewis Eigen, who runs the information lines.

The government spent $10.3 million on media in the ad campaign’s first month.

The Wally Bear tray liners, donated by the manufacturer, cost nothing.

A study by three marketing professors published in the Public Opinion Quarterly in 1996 examined whether youthful male drinking and driving could be reduced more by paid or contributed ad time. A free campaign, in Wichita, Kan., turned out to be just as effective as a paid one in Kansas City, Kan. The scholars urged social marketers not to abandon donated campaigns.

Oddly, the ad blitz begins just as the incidence of youth drug activity stopped rising for the first time in five years. McCaffrey’s latest drug control report, released this year, says children’s use of marijuana, methamphetamine, inhalants, heroin and cocaine either leveled or declined in 1996 and 1997, though it is much higher than two decades ago.

The campaign planning began “before we got those numbers,” said one drug office official. “And the atmosphere here about the ads is just evangelical.”

Times staff writer Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this story.