Public communication campaigns as mundane category

Professor Bente Halkier has contributed to ‘MedieKultur: Journal of media and communication research’ with the article ‘Public communication campaigns as mundane category’.

The article is co-written with Pernille Almlund and Kim Christian Schrøder, both from the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University, as well as Nina Blom Andersen from the Department of Management and Administration at University College Copenhagen.

The article examines the public connection and understanding of public communication campaigns. Public communication campaigns are widespread, but the audience dimension of the campaign category itself is still a blind spot in research.

Drawing on focus group interviews and a survey among Danish citizens, the article shows that public campaigns are recognised as a mundane communicative category. Moreover, drawing on theories of public connection and governmentality, the authors show how citizens receive and resist, accept and negotiate public campaigns.

The article concludes that the data material does not display unambiguous attention or involvement that results in people following the advice given in public campaigns.

Similarly, the perception of public campaigns as governance-strategies is ambiguous. On the one hand, they are perceived as necessary, and in some cases, establishing a feel-good effect. On the other hand, the advice given in the campaigns is always negotiated and sometimes resisted, since people do not like to be dictated or patronised.

Read the full article (open access): Public communication campaigns as mundane category