Health communication campaigns are an effective behavior change tool that can affect a broad range of outcomes, including mental health. During the process of campaign development, a critical decision involves which messages to use in a campaign. One common approach to message selection is the use of target audience message ratings, or what is referred to as perceived message effectiveness (PME). In this approach, target audience members rate messages on PME, and those data are then used to inform message selection for the campaign. The purpose of this chapter is to (a) introduce and define PME, (b) describe the relationship between PME and actual message effectiveness, (c) describe a protocol for applying PME, (d) share two case studies that used PME for message selection, (e) discuss critiques and limitations of PME, and (f) discuss implications for mental health campaign designers.
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