Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Matt Lerner for insightful comments and advice on earlier drafts. I would further like to thank everyone at Founders Pledge who bounced ideas around with me, and who gave useful comments and questions during an earlier presentation upon this topic.

(This shallow report is viewable as a google doc here, and has BOTECs here.)

Executive Summary

Mass media campaigns aim to promote behavior change (for example, to reduce rates of smoking or drinking alcohol) via programming over different media sources, such as radio and TV. Mass media interventions have not generally been prioritized within the global health field (e.g. see GiveWell’s 2012 report here), in part due to mixed RCT evidence regarding their effectiveness upon reducing mortality. In this report, I use power analyses (implemented in R, primarily via monte carlo simulations) to demonstrate that previous RCTs have been hugely underpowered to detect these effects. I therefore preferentially utilize other forms of evidence (including RCT evidence of the effect of mass media upon behavior change more broadly, which they are better powered to detect, and evidence from other forms of media such as advertising) to examine the likely effectiveness of mass media campaigns upon health and wellbeing. My BOTECs indicate that mass media campaigns can be extremely cost-effective (i.e. I estimate 26x GiveDirectly for a family planning campaign from Family Empowerment Media, and 31x GiveDirectly for a hypothetical initiative to reduce intimate partner violence). These values reflect that (1) mass media campaigns can be highly cost-effective at even a very small effect size, given the number of people that they can reach, and (2) information (unlike say, a bednet) does not necessarily disintegrate with time and can be freely passed onto others, and in small percentage of cases may contribute to broader changes in social norms. Overall, I think that mass media campaigns present a highly promising—albeit risky, relative to other global health interventions—area for philanthropic investment. I argue that (in many cases) this is a philanthropic investment worth taking. In particular, I highlight the potential role of mass media in correcting misconceptions about modern contraception, and in combating intimate partner violence.

Summary

The promise of mas...

Family Empowerment Media

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