The National Physical Activity Plan incorporates or suggests that mass media campaigns can be pretty important. But the effects of mass media campaigns by themselves are pretty modest, not a whole lot of significance, so they need to have larger multi-component interventions. So we can see this when we have done in the school interventions, and that a multi-component intervention is more beneficial, particularly those that incorporate a social component. So mass media campaigns might be at this point most helpful for boosting walking behavior, particularly walkability within cities and so on. But I want to talk about a particularly interesting intervention that really, in my mind, addresses a lot of the things that we've talked about in these video segments thus far. So this is something that was done in the UK and it is a national media campaign geared toward boosting leisure time physical activity for women. It tried to overcome many of the obstacles toward physical fitness for women. So they really went in and analyzed what the perceived barriers are to engage in physical activity, and identified that a lot of what was preventing many of the women in their focus groups and preliminary data acquisition from engaging in sport were concerns over judgment over the way they looked, or appeared, or over not being competent, or good enough at it. So self-efficacy in multiple domains, and also self-consciousness about physical appearance. So wanted to figure out ways to overcome those barriers, and realized that a lot of the framing of encouragement to physical activity or engaging in sport either ignores it, ignores these barriers or tries to appeal or make sport appealing, but comes at it from an incorrect angle. So it needs to align with women's values. If there's a pretty significant gender gap, then let's think about, okay, what are the things that are important to women, and make it appealing on that way. So they went through an analysis of a value system and looked at all the many different values that the women in that culture were reporting being of significance to them in their role both within the social sphere, but also competence and professional domains and so on, goal orientation. Then there is this kind of body image component too all part of a value systems. So they developed, I'll go ahead and give you the grand finale. It was a very successful campaign. It was based on these guiding principles in that you don't just say, "Oh, hey, go engage in physical activity." Recognize that there are barriers and that there are negative associations that people might have with respect to engaging in sport. So for example, women might not enjoy the competitive element or they might be concerned about looking sillier and feminine or not pretty or whatever. So here's a quote here that you're either a natural at being good at sports or you're not, and if you're not, then go sit and have a tea party or whatever. Principle two, it might be important to differentiate exercise and sport, and promote the additional benefits. Don't just preach, but actually say like, you know what? There many benefits to engaging in physical activity above and beyond, this is good for you. There other things, it might actually be fun and enjoyable. Also need to take advantage of social contagion and get stakeholders and women in the community invested in this and buying in, and take it into the community and make it more visible. Speak about things positively. This is about message framing. Don't frame it and say, "Oh, well, if you are staying in and not engaging in sport, then that's bad for you." No, take it out like, here are the benefits, here is the good stuff about it, try to make it fun. Their intrinsic and extrinsic incentives, and to really think about it occurring in a larger system and how that relates to values. Make it easy for women to act. Try to figure out overcoming the realities of busy lifestyles. Also, think about the personal, emotional elements with respect to fears or concerns or self-consciousness. Try to find ways to boost self-efficacy and one's ability to do it. So this is the campaign, this girl campaign. It was the first large-scale campaign. They actually used the words sweat and jiggle in the campaign. I've posted a link to the actual campaign, and watching it is extremely motivating. It makes you want to go out and start dancing right then, and it's really awesome. Please watch it after the end of this segment. But it really was the first of its kind. It wasn't the perfect six pack with the jog bra and perfect supermodels engaging in sport. It's regular everyday women having a blast, engaging in physical activity, and it is quite motivating.
