BCC Campaigns, Collective memory & pop culture. On why some slogans and symbols stay with us.

At some point in the early 1990s, children across Pakistan started rolling themselves into blankets and pretending to be insects. Atleast my cousin did, he would call himself "amrikan sundi" or "chitkabri sundi" if I rememeber correctly. The insects in question were agricultural pests (scientific names Helicoverpa armigera & Earias vitella). We had learned their names, from a regular public information campaign that ran on Pakistan Television, the national broadcaster, educating farming communities about crop protection. The campaign was dutiful, earnest, and regular, because children who had no particular stake in crop management absorbed its content so thoroughly. I don't remember much else, but a realisation somewhere in the back of my mind as a child that cotton farmers were important, and very busy and apparently the entire country cared or so it seemed. I cannot point you to an evaluation report that documents this. There is no end-line survey. There is no citation for the children in the blankets. There is only the memory of people who were those children, and the fact that they still remember, which is itself the thing I want to write about.Public health and development communication has become a serious field with serious tools for measuring its own performance. Social and behaviour change communication, known in the field as SBCC, now runs on frameworks, evidence hierarchies, and evaluation protocols that would have been unrecognisable to the people who made those agricultural pest advertisements. We can measure reach, recall, attitude shift, and in the better-designed programmes, behaviour change. We have gotten quite good at tracking what happens during a campaign. The question I find myself returning to, and that the field has been much slower to ask, is what happens after.

Some messages die when the budget runs out. They air for the campaign period, achieve the recall targets, appear in the end-line report, and then dissolve. Six months after close, nobody references them. A year later, they are gone from public consciousness as completely as if they had never been made. This is the normal trajectory. It is expected and it is fine; most communication is designed for a specific moment and a specific behaviour and does not need to outlast its programme cycle.But some messages do not work this way. Some of them persist. They enter the shared vocabulary of a generation and keep operating there long after anyone is paying for them to do so. They become the frame through which people later process new experiences. They get quoted in different contexts. They become the thing someone reaches for when they are trying to explain something, or laugh at something, or make sense of something. This persistence is not incidental to the communication's success. In many cases, it is the success.The interesting question is what produces it. What is the difference between a message that ends with its campaign and one that becomes part of how a generation thinks?

One answer is rhyme. "Bachche do hi achhe" ran through Pakistan Television's programming for a generation as the tagline for family planning communication. Translating it loses something, but the meaning is roughly: two children is best. The slogan is a couplet. It rhymes in Urdu in a way that is clean and immediate, the kind of sound that lodges in the ear the way a folksong does. Whether this was a deliberate design choice or an intuitive one by whoever wrote the copy, I cannot say with certainty. But the result was a phrase that people can still recall decades later, that parents used with children, that became a shorthand for a whole set of ideas about family size and household welfare that no poster could have carried alone.Rhyme is one of the oldest mnemonic technologies humans have. Oral traditions use it for exactly this reason: a rhymed phrase travels further, gets repeated more faithfully, and survives in memory longer than prose. Something in the acoustic structure of a well-made rhyme reduces the effort of recall. You do not have to try to remember it. It is just there. The family planning campaigns that produced dry, factual messaging about contraceptive methods and maternal health indicators were not wrong; they were just doing a different and less durable thing.

A more ambitious version of the same logic is what UNICEF attempted in South Asia in the early 1990s with Meena. The character of Meena, a nine-year-old girl from a rural South Asian village, was developed through years of research across four countries, with the specific goal of creating a figure that could cross the region's cultural and linguistic borders while still feeling native to each of them (McKee, cited in The Business Standard, 2020). The name was chosen because it worked in Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, and Bangla. The parrot Mithu, the brother Raju, the grandmother, the scheming shopkeeper: every element of the cast was tested in focus groups, iterated, and tested again until the characters felt locally real rather than generically South Asian (OnlineKhabar, 2021).The result was a multimedia package that appeared on television, in comic books distributed through schools, in radio programmes, and in teacher training materials. It ran in seven countries including Pakistan, broadcast in Urdu among other languages (Wikipedia, 2025). It addressed girls' education, child marriage, hygiene, and gender equity. It was still being used in school curricula years after the initial broadcast run ended.The children who watched Meena in Pakistani primary schools in the mid-1990s are now in their mid-thirties. They are raising children of their own. Whether any of them thinks about girls' education differently because of a cartoon they watched thirty years ago is genuinely unknowable. No evaluation was designed at the time to ask this, and designing one now would be methodologically nightmarish. But the question is not absurd. The question is whether a communication investment made in 1993 is still yielding something in 2026, and if so, what that something is worth, and whether it was the result of chance or design.

Commander Safeguard is a cleaner case, and also a stranger one, because it crossed a boundary that development communication almost never crosses. It became genuinely popular culture.The character was introduced in 1998 by Procter and Gamble Pakistan as the mascot for its Safeguard soap brand, created to promote handwashing among children (Grokipedia, 2026). In 2005, the concept was developed into Pakistan's first 3D animated superhero television series, produced by the advertising agency IAL Saatchi and Saatchi (Wikipedia, 2026). Commander Safeguard fought the forces of dirt and germs, embodied in the villain Dirtoo and the memorable Kachra Rani, the Queen of Filth, a creature made of the world's waste. The show ran for over a decade, spawned sequels and spin-offs, and was eventually exported to Mexico, where it reportedly outrated SpongeBob SquarePants (Pakistan Defence, 2007). Children imitated the commander in costume parties. They ran to wash their hands after episodes aired, which was, of course, the entire point (Express Tribune, 2012). What I find interesting is what happened in 2020, when COVID-19 arrived and governments everywhere were urgently telling people to wash their hands. Across Pakistani social media, joke posts appeared asking the same question: where is Commander Safeguard now when we need him? A fictional soap mascot from a commercial campaign that had first aired fifteen years earlier had become the cultural reference point through which a generation processed a new public health crisis. The character had been absorbed into collective memory so completely that he could be invoked in a completely different context, for a completely different threat, by people who were no longer children. It is the return on a communication investment showing up in a form that the investment's designers did not know they were creating.

There is a song that used to run on Pakistan Television whose formal title I believe is "Mere Sartaj Ki Chitthi Mere Naam Aayi Hai": my husband's letter has arrived in my name. I cannot find a documented source for it, which is itself part of the story. The song depicts a woman who has received a letter from her husband, who is working in the big city. She cannot read. She holds the letter and turns it over, and the whole song is her mind moving through the problem of being in possession of something intimate and addressed specifically to her, something she desperately wants to know, but which she cannot open alone because opening it means handing it to someone else to read aloud.The emotion of that situation does more for women's literacy as a cause than any factual communication about female enrolment rates. The woman in the song is not a statistic. She is a particular person with a particular desire and a particular constraint, and anyone watching understands immediately and physically what illiteracy costs her in that moment. The campaign message about why girls should go to school is present in every second of the song, but it is delivered entirely through feeling. The argument is never stated. It does not need to be. What is interesting about this, in terms of how we think about communication design, is that the most emotionally resonant piece of literacy advocacy I am aware of from that era has left almost no trace in any archive. What survives is the memory of people who saw it, who still remember it, and who can still describe what it made them feel. That is its record. 

There is a pattern here that is worth naming. The messages that stayed, across these different examples, share certain features. They had characters, not just information. They had sound, rhythm, or melody that made the content easier to carry in the mind. They created emotional investment before they made their argument. They appeared in multiple formats over time rather than in a single concentrated burst. And perhaps most importantly, they gave their audience something to do with them: something to repeat, to play with, to reference in a new situation, to quote to a friend.The agricultural pest advertisements worked, if my memory of other people's memories is accurate, because they were regular enough to become familiar, specific enough to be interesting, and just entertaining enough that children who were not farmers found reasons to engage with them anyway. The information was genuinely useful to adults in agricultural households. The format made it entertaining enough that children absorbed it as a side effect of simply watching.This is not a magic formula. Most campaigns that try to be entertaining are not memorable, and many memorable campaigns do not change behaviour. But there is something in the design logic of the cases above that feels different from the standard SBCC toolkit. They were not primarily designed to deliver information efficiently. They were designed to be the kind of thing a person would want to spend time with. The information, the normative message, the intended behaviour: these were present, but they rode inside something that had its own reason to exist.

I want to be careful not to turn this into a prescription. The SBCC field's investment in rigorous evaluation has produced genuine knowledge about what changes behaviour, and the dominant approaches to measurement are not wrong, just incomplete. A campaign that does not produce measurable behaviour change within the programme cycle has failed at the thing it was built to do, regardless of whether it lodges in collective memory. Commander Safeguard was, among other things, a commercial product. The question of whether it was effective for Procter and Gamble is somewhat different from the question of whether it was effective for public health.The gap I am pointing at is not in the campaigns themselves but in what we think we are measuring when we evaluate them, and what therefore gets designed in and left out. An evaluation framework that only looks at the programme cycle will rationally produce communication that is designed for the programme cycle. It will not naturally produce Meena, or "Bachche do hi achhe," or a song about a woman and a letter she cannot read. Those things required someone to think, even if implicitly, about what kind of thing would still be alive in people's minds years from now. They required a design logic oriented toward cultural durability, not just documented reach.We do not have a good vocabulary for this yet, and we certainly do not have measurement tools for it. What we have is a collection of examples, and the slightly humbling recognition that the most durable communication investments in Pakistan's public health and development history were not necessarily the ones that scored highest on end-line surveys. That seems worth thinking about.

References

Express Tribune. 2012. "Animatedly Yours." The Express Tribune, July 22. https://tribune.com.pk/story/409963/animatedly-yoursGrokipedia. 2026. "Commander Safeguard." Grokipedia, February 12. https://grokipedia.com/page/Commander_SafeguardOnlineKhabar. 2021. "The Story Behind Meena Cartoon, 90s Kids' Favourite TV Show, and Its Link with Nepal." OnlineKhabar English News, January 24. https://english.onlinekhabar.com/the-story-behind-meena-cartoon-90s-kids-favourite-tv-show-and-its-link-with-nepal.htmlPakistan Defence. 2007. "Pakistani Animated Character Takes Mexico by Storm." Pakistan Defence Forum, September 27. https://defence.pk/threads/pakistani-animated-character-takes-mexico-by-storm.7683/The Business Standard. 2020. "Meena Cartoon: Meena's Journey of Three Decades." The Business Standard, September 24. https://www.tbsnews.net/feature/panorama/meenas-journey-three-decades-136906Wikipedia. 2025. "Meena (character)." Wikipedia, last modified November 22. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meena_(character)Wikipedia. 2026. "Commander Safeguard." Wikipedia, last modified February 13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Safeguard