Chubby Checker is an American singer and dancer. He is widely known for popularizing many dance styles, including the Twist dance style, with his 1960 hit cover of Hank Ballard & The Midnighters' R&B song "The Twist", and the pony dance style with the 1961 cover of the song "Pony Time". His biggest UK hit, "Let's Twist Again", was released one year later ; that year, he also popularized the song "Limbo Rock", originally a previous-year instrumental hit by the Champs to which he added lyrics, and its trademark Limbo dance, as well as other dance styles such as The Fly. In September 2008, "The Twist" topped Billboard's list of the most popular singles to have appeared in the Hot 100 since its debut in 1960, an honor it maintained in an August 2013 update of the list.
A public service announcement (PSA) is a message in the public interest disseminated by the media without charge to raise public awareness and change behavior. Oftentimes these messages feature unsettling imagery, ideas or behaviors that are designed to startle or even scare the viewer into understanding the consequences of undergoing a particular harmful action or inaction as well as the importance of avoiding such choices. In the UK, they are generally called a public information film (PIF); in Hong Kong, they are known as an announcement in the public interest (API).
Smokey Bear is an American campaign and advertising icon of the U.S. Forest Service in the Wildfire Prevention Campaign, which is the longest-running public service announcement campaign in United States history to date. The Ad Council, the Forest Service, and the National Association of State Foresters, in partnership with the creative agency FCB, use the character of Smokey Bear to educate the public about the dangers of unplanned human-caused wildfires.
Patrick Joseph Kennedy II is an American retired politician and mental health advocate. From 1995 to 2011, he served as a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from Rhode Island's 1st congressional district, and was the first Generation X member of congress when he took office in 1995. He is a former member of the Opioid and Drug Abuse Commission and a co-founder of One Mind, a mental health nonprofit.
"Just Say No" was an advertising campaign prevalent during the 1980s and early 1990s as a part of the U.S.-led war on drugs, aiming to discourage children from engaging in illegal recreational drug use by offering various ways of saying no. The slogan was created and championed by Nancy Reagan during her husband's presidency.
The Advertising Council, commonly known as Ad Council, is an American nonprofit organization that produces, distributes, and promotes public service announcements or PSAs on behalf of various sponsors, including nonprofit organizations, non-governmental organizations and agencies of the United States government.
Declare Yourself was an American campaign that aimed to encourage young people to register to vote. The campaign was founded by philanthropist, Norman Lear in 2004 and was led by former American presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. The 2004 campaign consisted of a road trip to towns across the country to educate people about the United States Declaration of Independence and voting rights. The 2006 campaign involved public service announcements that compared not voting to people silencing themselves and not standing up for their beliefs. The 2008 campaign consisted of videos posted on YouTube and MySpace to promote voting and the 2011 campaign featured a bondage-themed photo series comparing not voting to restricting yourself. In 2011, Declare Yourself merged with another campaign to form the nonprofit, Our Time.
This Is Your Brain on Drugs was a large-scale US anti-narcotics campaign by Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) launched in 1987, that used three televised public service announcements (PSAs) and a related poster campaign.
The More You Know is a series of public service announcements (PSAs) broadcast on the NBCUniversal family of networks in the United States and other locations, featuring educational messages. These PSAs are broadcast occasionally during NBC's network programming.
Companies Committed to Kids was a Canadian non-profit organization based in Toronto, founded in 1990 by former chief executive officer Sunni Boot and former president of the Global Television Network David Mintz as a contributive production-wide body dedicated to launching campaigns and expressing the significance of their public service announcements to target children between the ages of eight and 12. It produced over 30 announcements, covering topics such as drug abuse, conformity, self-esteem, and bullying. Each PSA ends with the logo of the organization. Usually, the commercials partnered up with Health Canada.
Janet Jackson is an American pop and R&B singer and actress. Jackson garnered a substantial gay following during the 1990s as she gained prominence in popular music. Recognized as a long-term ally of the LGBTQ community, Jackson received the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Music Album for her Grammy Award-winning sixth studio album The Velvet Rope (1997), which spoke out against homophobia and embraced same-sex love. In 2005, Jackson received the Humanitarian Award from the Human Rights Campaign and AIDS Project Los Angeles in recognition of her involvement in raising funds for AIDS Charities and received the Vanguard Award at the 19th Annual GLAAD Media Awards in 2008. In June 2012, Jackson announced she was executive producing a documentary on the lives of transgender people around the world titled Truth, saying she agreed to sign on to help stop discrimination against the transgender community.
Marvelyn Brown is an African-American author and AIDS activist. She is the founder of Marvelous Connections, an HIV/AIDS organization founded in 2006. She wrote the autobiography The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful and (HIV) Positive, which tells her story as a young heterosexual woman living with HIV. She has delivered public speeches and made public appearances in the United States, Bermuda, Canada, Jamaica, Mexico, the Virgin Islands, South Africa, Tanzania, and Rwanda.
Rodney Michael Harvey was an American actor, model, singer and dancer.
Henry Lozano is a non-profit executive and grassroots organizer. His years of public service culminated in his post at the White House as Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of USA Freedom Corps. On August 10, 2011, he was appointed to serve as the Director of Los Angeles County Teen Challenge and Urban Ministries Initiatives.
Embrace Life is a short British public information film made for the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership (SSRP) about the importance of wearing seat belts. Released on 20 January 2010 and initially only shown in the local Sussex area, the short film became an international phenomenon after it was distributed on the internet, through social networking sites and YouTube, gaining over a million views in its first two weeks. By 13 February 2010 it had reached 129 different countries, was the 5th top rated video that month on YouTube and was the most top rated YouTube film of all time in the education category. The film achieved the highest rating of No. 8 Top Rated film on YouTube, and as of 27 March 2013 it has had over 16,599,000 views. The film has been praised for its beauty and its emotional impact. The film has so far not been shown on television as part of a road safety campaign; although that was for which it was primarily designed and its spread has been almost entirely through the internet.
Faces of Meth is a drug prevention project, run by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office in the U.S. state of Oregon. The project uses mug shots of repeat offenders to demonstrate the harmful and damaging effects of methamphetamine on its users. The idea for Faces of Meth began in 2004, when deputy Bret King of the Corrections Division Classification Unit used mug shots to identify individuals with a history of using methamphetamine. King and his co-workers collected images of people charged with crimes related to methamphetamine addiction to document the change in physical appearance over time due to the use of the drug. The project uses before and after mug shot photos to show the physical deterioration of the user as a result of using methamphetamine. The images were originally used in educational slideshow and video presentations delivered to students in Oregon high schools. This Faces of Meth drug prevention strategy has since become popular across the United States.
Partnership to End Addiction, formerly called The Partnership for a Drug Free America, is a non-profit organization aiming to prevent the misuse of illegal drugs. The organization is most widely known for its TV ad This Is Your Brain on Drugs.
Cannabis advertising is the advertising of cannabis products to consumers by the cannabis industry through a variety of media. It is regulated by U.S. states. Some or all forms of cannabis advertising are banned in many countries.
"Nothing Happens", also called "Nothing can happen to you, too", or "Marijuana can make nothing happen to you, too", was an anti-cannabis public service announcement created by the United States Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).
"Dog's View", also called "Talking Dog", is a 2007 anti-cannabis public service announcement (PSA) created by the United States Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) as part of the Above the Influence campaign. The PSA features a dog who sits down at a kitchen counter and asks a teenage girl if she might be smoking too much marijuana. It was one of several ONDCP PSAs shown to increase cannabis consumption in teens. It has been the subject of numerous parodies and critiques, including a Joe Rogan stand-up routine, and a 2008 parody featuring Aubrey Plaza who resembles the actress in the original. The original PSA acquired over 1.1 million views on YouTube between its upload in 2008 and 2017. In 2011, Adweek profiled the PSA as one of ten that "make you want to take drugs". In 2018, it was ranked by High Times as one of the top six worst anti-cannabis ads, "hilariously inaccurate".
