Public Service Announcement (PSA) is a time-tested method of raising awareness, but it may not always create the desired impacts.
A PSA may lose its purpose to inform the masses, raise public awareness and prompt people to take positive actions if it is not creative, innovative, and engaging. Sadly, most PSAs in Nepal's airwaves are dull; and the listeners do not pay attention to them.
The radio PSAs produced and broadcast by PSA are not just innovative, but they are also appealing and exciting.
For instance, listen to this PSA about fire safety:
In Nepal's southern plains region, public miking remains a popular way of informing local people about which film is showing in their town. The trend of advertising a film by shouting through a loudspeaker may be fading away, but most people still connect to it.
So, PARC collaborated with popular film actor Rabindra Jha to produce this innovative radio PSA about community fire, which people in the plains are highly vulnerable to.
Jha has perfectly created the voice of someone who goes throughout the town on a rickshaw with a loudspeaker. The only difference is he is sharing tips about fire safety instead of asking people to flock to the theater.
Jha is from Nepal's Terai region, and he used his natural accent in the PSA because it was targeted towards the people of this very region. Especially in the rural villages of Terai, where most houses are made of wood, bamboo and thatch roofs, people are vulnerable to fire risks that can be easily minimized by taking some simple precautionary measures.
If these simple fire safety measures are communicated through a conventional PSA, they may not work. So, PARC had to be imaginative in its approach.
And this is what PARC is good at: innovating new ways to create bigger impacts, while bringing value for the money spent by its clients.
Other innovate radio PSAs produced by PARC: