Fundamentals of Public Communication Campaigns

CHAPTER 8 Entertainment–Education, Digital Games, and Celebrity Campaigns

Can stories, entertainment, games, or even celebrities’ involvement succeed where traditional public health campaigns have failed? The task of this chapter is to address this important question. To begin, an extensive review of the literature indicates that Entertainment–Education programming can be an effective method for spreading prosocial and health content. It is believed that, under certain circumstances, such programming is even more productive than conventional media-based persuasive messages.¹ Also referred to as edutainment, Entertainment–Education (EE) is a communication strategy that aspires to ease a social problem or educate the public through a customized type of entertainment. It is defined by a series of approaches and methodologies that seek to apply different levels of mass media to instill social and behavior change.² EE works by leveraging entertainment content to contribute to “the process of directed social change, which can occur at the level of an individual, community, or society” by manipulating attitudes, social norms, and behaviors as the public gets exposed to nondidactic entertainment.³

Popular entertainment programs like soap operas are the most famous forms of EE to induce social change.⁴ Soap operas portray real-life circumstances like friendships, love affairs, and family life. A soap opera is a radio or TV series that often addresses domestic situations and includes ...