They dropped the ball on this one. Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention reports that the CDC’s successful Verb campaign will become a past participle after a successful five-year run. This multifaceted social marketing campaign encouraged 9 to 13 year olds to get active and made exercise fun, creative and attractive. According to the Wall Street Journal, Congress failed to renew funding for the CDC to continue the program, which will run out of money this month. To date, the government has put $339 million into advertising and marketing for the Verb campaign, which urges kids to find their own action word and do it.
In addition to the ad campaign, the cornerstone of the program were the yellow balls that t
hey handed out — about 500,000 of them. Each ball has a number, and kids were encouraged to blog about what they did with their ball on the VerbNow.com website and then pass the ball along to a friend. About 12,600 kids have “blogged” their ball.
The campaign evaluations have been quite successful (from the WSJ):
The end of the Verb campaign comes just as data are trickling in showing that it was surprisingly effective at boosting physical activity among school children. A recent study of more than 2,700 school kids published in the medical journal Pediatrics showed that 9- and 10-year-old kids who had seen the Verb campaign reported one-third more physical activity during their free time than kids who hadn’t seen Verb. Among girls ages 9-13, the ad campaign boosted free-time physical activity by nearly 27%.
Awareness of the Verb campaign was extensive, with 70-80% of school kids knowing about the program. Apparently awareness among adults was much lower, resulting in the decision by Congress to take away funding. And this at a time when obesity, which starts in childhood, has reached epidemic proportions. I guess we’ll just go back to having the health teachers droning “Exercise is good for you. You should do it.”
Technorati Tags: verb, marketing, social marketing, physical activity
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
