Understanding Advertisements: Forming Awareness towards Accomplishing Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

“Audio-visual advertisements for communicating the SDGs can be seen in recent times. Intellectual ads are mainly for educated people about sustainability. Ads should be entertaining, informative, and most importantly, celebrity promotion might help to inculcate innovative measures to alter the attitude and behaviour of audiences. This study analyses the secondary data on areas like the progress of SDGs, the status of SDGs from the member states, SGD index, and goal-wise score, and social progress index scores, while connecting SDGs with SPI. The study also explores the international ads aiming at SDGs through a direct and indirect approach, and Indian ads that are aiming at SDGs through an indirect approach. The research also adopted FGD to understand the audience’s perception of the advertisements after exposure and to find out the areas for improvement for Indian audiovisual advertisements. This study suggests that these ads should focus more on sensitivity towards sustainability, especially among the rural audience. The research finds that non-binary representation of gender is not included in the ads. It is also suggested that the promotion through community radio can be a good option; celebrity endorsement and displaying testimonial may work better for promoting goals among people; poverty could have been displayed more prominently; the goals can be communicated through local ambassadors; demonstration of all the goals are also important; multilingual advertisements could be effective; poverty, hunger, gender equality, and health should get more focus; FDS and folk media should be used to transmit these ideas to the rural population; posters, local doctors, local Anganwadi or Asha workers can help in understanding the concepts and goals better.