Guest Lecture on Public Service Announcement (PSA) by Biswajit Dey

As a part of the Design Unit: Advertisements, our MYP 3A learners attended a guest lecture on Public Service Announcement / Advertising (PSA) by Biswajit Dey on 15 September 2017. The lecture was a follow-up on the introduction to PSA which the students had attended earlier, and it reinforced the basic tenets of PSA which will lead the learners to their PSA summative assessment which the MYP 3A learners will present later.

The lecture clarified that PSAs, in essence, are created for and are committed to ‘greater good’ – and are viewed as people ‘fighting for a cause’ to save something (like water, animals) or fight against social evils (like smoking, drunk driving). The learners were then taken through a collection of previously-published print-based and video PSAs on topics such as climate change, cruelty to animals, anti-smoking, anti-drunk driving, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, saving water, saving our rivers, etc.

Stating that PSAs were tough to create as they had to change human behaviour, the lecture laid out the basic steps in creating PSAs: identifying a cause, researching the subject, developing a personal point of view, and creating the message.