Scottish Government

ISBN 0 7559 2835 0 (Web only publication)

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Campaign Overview

• As part of a long term strategy to address problems of racism in Scotland, the Scottish Executive launched a major advertising campaign in September 2002. The campaign aimed to raise awareness of racism among the general public, highlight its negative impact, and promote the valuable contributions that other cultures have made and continue to make to Scottish society. Further information about the campaign and previous waves of research can be found at www.infoscotland.com
• Research was set up to monitor the impact of the campaign (as measured by awareness of the campaign among the target audience, and the effect of the campaign on public attitudes). This summary relates to Wave 5 of the research.

• The latest Phase of the campaign was launched in February 2005. The advertising consisted of 3 sets of TV adverts, cinema, bus-side and radio - and spanned 6 weeks (14 February - 31 March).

Highlights

• 53% of respondents were of advertising on the subject of anti-racism without being prompted at Wave 5. This figure is slightly higher than the figure at Wave 4 (46%) but lower than the last time TV adverts were used as part of the campaign (Wave 3: 68%).
• Recall from the radio was good: just under a quarter of respondents claimed to have heard advertising on the radio and of those 51% could describe an aspect from the recent campaign.
• Recall from the TV/Cinema advertising was quite limited: although just under three quarters of all respondents claimed to have seen the campaign on TV/Cinema, only 23% of these could describe an aspect specifically relating to the latest phase of One Scotland. The advert Canada cut through at the highest level (17%) whilst Virus and Different made little impact at 4% and 3% respectively.
• Attitudinally, racism was perceived to be less of a problem in Scotland at this latest wave: 9% regarded it as very serious compared to 23% at Wave 4.
• Although the research suggested that people were generally more willing to embrace diverse cultures, some attitudes showed a worrying trend: ' Being impolite or verbally offensive to people from other ethnic backgrounds in person' and 'Physically assaulting or using violence towards people from other ethnic backgrounds or their property' were both perceived as less serious than during previous waves of research.
• Some more positive trends were also noted. A higher proportion of respondents agreed that "People in Scotland ought to do more to stop racism occurring here" (78% compared to 73% at wave 4), a lower proportion agreed that "People are justified in verbally attacking asylum seekers who get housing and benefits in Scotland" (21% compared to 25% at wave 4) and a lower proportion agreed that "People from different ethnic or cultural backgrounds living in Scotland expect too much help from the government" (56% compared to 62% at wave 4).

Implications

• Wave 3 of research related to the launch phase of the advertising campaign in 2002 which had a significantly higher media spend. The expenditure on this latest phase of advertising was a third of the launch budget due to budgetary constraints. Reduced media spend restricts the visibility of the campaign and reduced visibility has significant impact on awareness levels.
• In this latest phase of advertising, the TV commercials only appeared on Channel 4 and Channel 5 and not on Scottish, Borders and Grampian. In contrast, the first phase of the campaign in 2002 did include TV adverts on these channels. This should be taken into account in assessing the performance of the campaign on this occasion.

• The adverts 'Virus' and 'Different' ran in cinemas for 2 weeks each. This is a relatively short time period for advertising, which may affect recall figures.