Anti-Drug Media Campaign

The Office of National Drug Control Policy's (ONDCP) National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign has been proposed as a nearly $1 billion federal effort over five years to combat rising drug use among the nation's youth. This report discusses (1) whether ONDCP provided timely financial reports to Congress, how money for paid advertising was managed and disbursed, and whether ONDCP complied with statutory requirements on the obligation of funds; (2) what ONDCP has done to develop and implement guidelines for the campaign in response to requirements mandated by law; and (3) whether the evaluation designs for phases I through III were appropriate, how well phase I and II evaluations were implemented, and how effective phases I and II of the campaign were in influencing group awareness of different types of paid anti-drug messages and drug attitudes.

GAO noted that: (1) in response to statutory financial reporting requirements and certain statutory spending restrictions, ONDCP generally provided timely financial reports to the appropriate Committees and complied with selected statutory spending restrictions imposed by Congress for fiscal years (FY) 1998 and 1999; (2) ONDCP had processes in place to monitor and approve all paid advertising expenditures before paying vendors and reporting to Congress; (3) ONDCP's success in meeting the congressionally mandated program requirements was mixed; (4) the match program, which was developed during phase I of the Campaign to meet the congressional requirement that ONDCP supplement existing public service announcements (PSA), resulted in over 265,000 pro bono or match PSAs; (5) due to the need to meet the Campaign's reach and frequency goals, ONDCP may not be able to meet the current congressional direction that it obtain a pro bono match as a part of each buy from every vendor; (6) contractor officials explained that some vendors were unwilling or financially unable to provide a match; (7) in some of these cases, it was necessary to make a purchase without the match so that ONDCP could meet the Campaign's reach and frequency goals in that market; (8) ONDCP did not develop a plan to secure private sector contributions; (9) ONDCP officials told GAO that they do not believe they will ever be able to attain the highest level of the congressionally mandated levels of contributions, which range from 40 to 100 percent of the annual Campaign appropriations for FY 1999 through FY 2002; (10) ONDCP developed policy and guidance prohibiting advertisements that feature political figures or partisan political purposes and established an advertisement review process but they had no internal controls requiring that these reviews be documented; (11) ONDCP's work with community anti-drug coalitions was limited in the first two phases of the Campaign; however, ONDCP and contractors planned and initiated numerous initiatives for phase III; (12) the results of the phases I and II evaluations regarding the Campaign's impact on youth, teen, and parent advertisement awareness and drug attitudes were inconclusive due to site selection problems, unknown parent response rates, low school response rates, and data analysis issues; (13) the 4-year phase III evaluation began in 1999, and its design appears promising; and (14) Ogilvy and Mather, the phase III advertising contractor, is to examine the impact of each media element, and the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information is to continue to collect data through the end of year 2000 on the volume of public contacts and publications distributed as supplemental measures of Campaign awareness/exposure.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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