Category Archives: PSA

Moving beyond texting for public health

Posted on August 5, 2008 | 3 comments

SMS as a modality for public health communication is so 1.5+ years ago. It’s trendy and effective(!) in Africa and certainly applicable to other rural areas of the world (mental note: remember this for vaccination projects in greater China as well as Vietnamese communities beyond Hanoi and Saigon). In case you’re interested in hopping on the bandwagon, here are good resources I picked up from attending a NetSquared presentation featuring Ben Rigby:

Anyhow, and beyond that, according to a Wikipedia entry on mobile advertising:

“Other forms include MMS advertising, advertising within mobile games and mobile videos, during mobile TV receipt, full-screen interstices, which appear while a requested item of mobile content or mobile web page is loading up, and audio adverts (eg, in the form of a jingle before a voicemail recording).”

Throwing down the gauntlet to myself and others to flesh out these other forms of mobile public health PSAs.

3 Comments

Posted in mobile advertising, PSA, public health, technology

Flash animated comic strips

Posted on July 24, 2008 | 3 comments

Years ago I was given a hard copy of this book of comic strips, Get Your War On, which was debuted by 23/6 in animation yesterday. [Obviously my embedding skills are currently on the lower end of the learning curve. Someone help, I tried readjusting the width and height in the html, but it cropped the video rather than resizing it.]

One of the projects I’m working on within the Vietnamese Community Outreach efforts of the Asian Liver Center is a collaboration with Single Asian Female to introduce the recurring subject of hepatitis B in her comic strips. We are working to syndicate the Single Asian Female comic in Vietnamese newspapers, but now, in addition, this would be a novel way to present it online and on our YouTube nonprofit channel (soon to be up and running).

By the way, John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy, was the first to work with Flash as a cartoon medium. And, by the way, he did my portrait.

3 Comments

Posted in Asian Liver Center at Stanford University, communications, media, PSA, technology, vietnamese

Noncommercial songs for PSAs or otherwise health promotional videos

Posted on July 14, 2008 | 2 comments

I’m in the middle of creating a short, generic, multi-use video documenting the Asian Liver Center‘s LiveRight Run 2008 tailored towards the Vietnamese population. I’ve been mulling for a legal approach for music for my short clip and had settled upon recruiting the Pizookies to create a short jam to match the mood of this piece (something akin to Dashboard Confessional’s “Don’t Wait”). Today a delve into the concept and culture of open source and the Creative Commons licensing serendipitously presented another solution of entering “noncommercial songs” into a search engine (as demonstrated on their site):


Up until this moment, I had only knowledge of a database of royalty-free loops.

2 Comments

Posted in Asian Liver Center at Stanford University, media, open source, PSA, public health