PSAs came into being with the entry of the United States into World War II. Radio broadcasters and advertising agencies offered their skills and facilities to aid the war effort and established the War Advertising Council, which became the official home front propaganda arm of the Office of War Information. Print media, outdoor advertising, and especially radio became the carriers of such messages as “Loose lips sink ships,” “Keep ’em Rolling,” and a variety of exhortations to buy war bonds.

By the end of the war, the practice of volunteering free airtime had become institutionalized, as had the renamed Advertising Council, which now served as a facilitating agency and clearinghouse for nationwide campaigns that soon became a familiar part of daily life. “Smokey the Bear” was invented by the Ad Council to personify its “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires” campaign; “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste” has raised millions of dollars for the United Negro College Fund; the American Cancer Society’s “Fight Cancer with a Checkup and a Check” raised public awareness as well as funds for research and patient services.

The ultimate demonstration of the effectiveness of PSAs came in 1969. Two years earlier, a federal court upheld the FCC’s application of the Fairness Doctrine to cigarette advertising on radio and television and ordered stations to set aside “a significant amount of time” for the broadcast of antismoking messages. This effectively meant one antismoking PSA would air for every three tobacco commercials. The PSAs proved so effective that smoking rates began to decline for the first time in history; the tobacco industry withdrew all cigarette advertising; and Congress made such advertising illegal after 1971. With the passage of that law, however, the bulk of the antismoking messages also disappeared and cigarette consumption rose again for a while. On balance, however, public health professionals credit the PSAs with having saved many millions of lives by initiating the decline in smoking by Americans.

During the 1960s and 1970s, as media access became an issue, the Advertising Council—and to some extent the very concept of PSAs—came under criticism as being too narrow in focus. As David Paletz points out in Politics in Public Service Advertising on Television, campaigns such as “Only you can stop pollution” were seen as distracting attention from the role of industry in creating demands for excessive energy and in creating dangerous waste products. Other campaigns struck critics as too eager to build consensus around seemingly inconsequential but carefully non-partisan concerns. The networks sought to distance themselves from the Ad Council, and to set their own agendas, by dealing directly with the organizations themselves. Local stations were under additional pressure from innumerable new community-based organizations seeking airtime; many stations created and produced announcements in an effort to meet local needs, especially once the FCC came to require that stations report how many PSAs they presented and at what hour.

In the 1980s a number of stations long held by their founders’ families went public or changed hands. The resulting debt load, mounting costs, as well as increased competition from the new media, all resulted in demands for greater profitability. Most unsold air-time was devoted to promoting the station or network. Moreover, deregulation saw government relinquishing the model of trusteeship of a scarce national resource in favor of a marketplace model.

Offsetting this trend to some extent were growing concerns about the illicit drug problem. The Advertising Media Partnership for a Drug-Free America (famous for the PSA intoning “This is your brain . . .” over a shot of an egg; “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?” over a shot of an egg frying) was set up by a group of media and advertising agency executives, spearheaded by Capital Cities Broadcasting Company, then completing the takeover of ABC. Rallying unprecedented support, the organization mounted the largest public-service campaign ever. Indeed, at its height, with more than $365 million worth of print lineage and airtime annually, it rivaled the largest advertising campaigns. Consistent with contemporary thinking about the nature of social marketing, the campaign was solidly grounded in McGuire’s paradigm of behavioral change: awareness of a problem by a number of people will result in a smaller number who undergo a change of attitude toward the problem; an even smaller number from this second group will actually change their behavior. During the first years of the campaign, its research team documented considerable difference in attitudinal and behavioral change among young people. Later evidence led to less-optimistic conclusions about the antidrug campaign, as a number of societal factors changed and media time and space became less readily available.

Other recent developments include two distinctive strategies. The Entertainment Industries Council combined high-profile film, television, and recording stars doing network PSAs with depiction efforts—producers, writers, and directors incorporating seatbelt use, designated drivers, AIDS education, and antidrug references in storylines. The other major development, championed and often carried out by consultants, was the appearance of the Total Station Project. Stations would adopt a public-service theme and, often after months of planning and preparation, coordinate PSAs with station editorials, heavily promoted public-affairs programs, and features in the local news broadcasts. Total Station Projects most frequently are aired during sweeps periods, the months when the station’s ratings determine the next year’s commercial time prices.