Association of exposure to a mass media social marketing campaign with youth physical activity and nutrition intake knowledge and behaviors

Social marketing campaigns using mass media have been increasingly employed to promote healthy lifestyle behaviors when tackling the obesity problem. Social marketing has been found to be effective in improving awareness and attitudes, but it is unclear whether the improvement is sustained long term or whether it leads to behavior changes. In a Midwest urban community, a mass media social marketing campaign was initiated in spring 2009 to promote youth behavioral recommendations for physical activity and nutrition intake. This study assessed campaign awareness and physical activity and nutrition intake knowledge and behaviors in youth over a two-year period to examine the impact of the social marketing campaign. A telephone survey was conducted in fall 2009 (N=504, response rate=60%) to collect awareness, knowledge, and behavior information of youth aged 12-18 years immediately after the completion of a five-month mass media campaign. The survey was repeated at the end of the second-year campaign efforts in winter 2010. Ordered logistic regressions were conducted to examine the effect of the social marketing campaign on knowledge and behaviors and to examine the trend over years, after controlling for demographic factors. We found that exposure to the social marketing campaign was significantly associated with better knowledge of behavioral recommendations (OR=2.14, 95% CI= [1.52, 3.01]) in youth and that these improvements were sustained over two years. The knowledge improvement was, however, not accompanied by a statistically significant improvement in behaviors, which suggests the need for additional research to examine youth health behaviors over a longer time frame.