Characteristics
The most common topics of PSAs are health and safety, such as the multimedia Emergency Preparedness & Safety Tips On Air and Online (talk radio/blog) campaign. A typical PSA is part of a public awareness campaign to inform or educate the public about an issue such as obesity or compulsive gambling. The range of possible topics has expanded over time.
From time to time a charitable organization enlists the support of a celebrity for a PSA; examples include actress Kathryn Erbe telling people to be green and Crips street gang leader Stanley "Tookie" Williams speaking from prison to urge youth not to join gangs. Some PSAs tell people to adopt animals instead of buying them. Protecting our Earth, also known as being green, is another example of a current PSA topic.
Some religious organizations produce PSAs on non-religious themes such as family values. Examples include the long-running homefront campaign from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and campaigns by the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the United Methodist Church.
Many of the military services produce PSAs primarily to recruit enlistees as an adjunct to their paid campaigns. The U.S. Marine Reserves also disseminates the annual Toys for Tots PSA campaign.
Some television shows featuring very special episodes made PSAs after the episodes. For example, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit talked about child abduction in one episode, so it had a PSA about child abduction. Another example is when the original Law & Order did an episode about drunk driving, which had a PSA about drunk driving.
During the 1980s, a large number of American cartoon shows contained PSA's at the end of their shows. These may or may not have been relevant to the episode itself. Three of the most widely known are the closing moral segments at the end of He Man and the Masters of the Universe, the "Knowing is Half the Battle" epilogues in GI Joe: A Real American Hero and the "Sonic Sez" segments from Adventures of Sonic The Hedgehog.
Some television PSAs have topics such as on not watching so much television, or not taking fictional shows literally; or about television, movie, or video game ratings.
Read more about this topic: Public Service Announcement