Are Teens Listening to Anti-Drug Ads?

This paper begins with the following words: "Over the years, advertisements run by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) have turned into popular culture icons. Spots like "This is your brain . . . this is your brain on drugs" have become part of the lingua franca. Over the years, PDFA, a non-profit started in 1986 and backed by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, has received more than $3 billion in donated media from the broadcast, cable, and radio networks, more than 1000 newspapers, and more than 100 magazines and medical journals. The massive amount of donated media PDFA receives annually makes it the largest advertiser of a 'single product' in the United States - after McDonald's. But does all that spending work? After all, as any parent will testify, it can be difficult getting through to teenagers. So we decided to investigate whether the target audience of the advertising - adolescents - was listening."

Having provided this context, the authors begin describing the research methodology they used to understand whether and why teenagers do or do not pay attention to media messages urging them to avoid destructive behaviour. They explain that, before it aired the ads, the PDFA began conducting annual surveys to independently test whether the advertising campaign was associated with a change in adolescents' drug use. These were known as the Partnership Attitude Tracking Surveys (PATS) and were obtained by asking teenagers to fill out anonymous questionnaires at central locations like malls. The first such PATS was initiated in early 1987, 3 months before the first anti-drug messages were aired. Additional "waves", which took place in 1988, 1989, and 1990, measured respondents' recall of PDFA advertisements.

A preliminary examination of that data revealed that the percentages of respondents who reported marijuana or cocaine/crack use in the previous 12 months did, in fact, decrease significantly between 1987 and 1990. However, researchers found that this analysis did not accommodate other potential explanations for changes in drug consumption over time, such as exposure to school-based anti-drug campaigns. To adjust for such other factors, they developed a detailed behavioral economic model that enables investigation of the relationship between adolescents' recall of anti-drug advertising and their probability of using various drugs - as well as the volume of use for those already using these drugs.

Describing their methodology in detail, the authors indicate that "we concluded that the "predisposition" formulation - i.e. that individuals have a "predisposition to use drugs" that manifests itself first in marijuana use - fit significantly better than the notion that the decision to try the two drugs is independent. Consequently, we used this formulation throughout. In addition, the data led us to reject the hypothesis that marijuana use increases the probability of cocaine/crack use. To be sure, individuals who have used marijuana in the past are indeed more likely to use cocaine/crack. But the reason is that - statistically speaking - individuals who are predisposed to try marijuana are also predisposed to try cocaine/crack."

The final section of the paper offers some impact-related conclusions: "The marginal effects of PDFA advertising on the probability of drug use were significantly greater for marijuana than for cocaine/crack across each wave. The cumulative effects suggest that, after three years of PDFA advertising, approximately 9.25 percent fewer adolescents were using marijuana and 3.6 percent were using crack/cocaine. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that anti-drug advertising reduces the probability of marijuana and cocaine/crack use among adolescents. However, our results also suggest that recall of anti-drug advertising is not associated with adolescents' decisions regarding how much marijuana or cocaine/crack to use among those already using each drug...."

Please note: this paper is no longer available on the Partnership for a Drug-Free America website. It is still available in the sourced journal mentioned below.