Mental Retardation Public Awareness Campaign (Ad Council, 1964-1966)
Proposed to the Ad Council in June 1963, after the President's Panel on Mental Retardation, and run for about three years from 1964. It was funded by the National Association for Retarded Children, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation and HEW. President Johnson said in June 1964 that the Ad Council had made mental retardation its 'number one effort'. Eunice Kennedy Shriver is credited with starting it.
- Years
- 1964–1966
- Country
- United States
- Budget
- A later federal report says the 3-year campaign brought in over $30 million in donated media time and space (as reported).
- Topic
- Developmental disability
- Asks people to
- RecognizeSupport a policy
- Strategy
- Simple instruction
- Channel
- OutdoorPrintRadioTV
- Audience
- General publicParents
Evidence
Self-reportedUnknown
Only donated-media value is reported (over $30 million). No outcome data found.
Sponsor (who paid)
- Ad Council Ad Council (pro bono), campaign producer
- National Association for Retarded Children (later Citizens; now The Arc) NGO, funder
- Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation Foundation, funder
- U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare Federal government, funder
Credits (who made it)
- Young & Rubicam Creative, 1964-1968 source
Sources
- Johnson, Remarks to a mental retardation group from the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Foundation (15 Jun 1964) archive · 1964
- President's Committee on Mental Retardation report (Minnesota GCDD Parallels in Time archive, 1986) archive
- President's Committee on Mental Retardation report (Minnesota GCDD Parallels in Time archive, 1968) archive · 1968
- Shriver, Eunice Mary Kennedy (Encyclopedia.com) reference
- University of Illinois Archives, Ad Council Historical File 1941-1997 (RS 13/2/207), finding aid, box(es) 63 archive
Research notes
Taxonomy gap: no topic for intellectual/developmental disability, so 'mental-health' is the closest; consider adding 'developmental-disability'. The end year is garbled in the OCR of the federal timeline ('1964-196'), and the 3-year length suggests 1966-67. Encyclopedia.com calls it a five-year campaign. It is not certain which of the two PCMR PDFs carries the timeline and which carries the $30M figure. Originals: Illinois Archives RS 13/2/207, box(es) 63; the parsed folder list is in data/ad-council-historical-file-13-2-207.tsv. Agency from the Illinois Historical File (13/2/207), Series 'Mental Retardation': Young & Rubicam for the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation and HEW (1964-66), then for the President's Committee on Mental Retardation (1967-68). The archive's items run to 1968, so endYear 1966 may be early; left unchanged until the end of the campaign is confirmed.
Record cases/ad-council-mental-retardation-1964.json, updated 2026-10-22· Link to this campaign