Advertising can be used not only as an excellent business promotional tool, but as a quite powerful educational and informational tool as well. This is exactly the case with the "Just Say No" advertising campaign, which was a part of famous White House "War on Drugs" rally of 1986. The Just Say No advertising campaign was fostered by Nancy Reagan and was aimed at reducing the recreational drug use among teenagers and young people of America. This anti recreational drug use advertising campaign was out and running through the whole 1980s decade of the last century and through the largest part of the 90s of the same century. The Just Say No was the main slogan of a certain number of television commercials, which demonstrated to teenagers and young people different ways of saying "no" to the illegal recreational drug use.

Later on this Just Say No slogan moved into other various educational advertising campaigns, which encouraged the youth to say "no" to such things as violence or premarital sex. In the late 80s of the last century, the Just Say No to recreational drug use advertising campaign "migrated" to the United Kingdom and was promoted and popularized by BBC. At the time in the UK, this educational advertising campaign received a new name of "Drugwatch" campaign and it mainly revolved around a heroin-addiction storyline in the popular children's TV drama serial Grange Hill.

In the USA, the Just Say No to recreational drug use advertising campaign was quite efficient at reaching with its message large masses of its target viewer audiences. The main idea that stood behind this campaign was to constantly and repeatedly reach with its powerful message teenage and young people audiences along with the audiences of those people, who exert a great influence on the young generation. Thus, the Just Say No to recreational drug use advertising campaign was aimed not only at youth, but also at their parents, teachers, clergy and mentors. Later, the War on Drugs advertising and educational campaign began to use other media, besides the television, such as the Internet or printed editions. According to the statistics, after the years of putting efforts towards promoting a healthy way of life and anti recreational drug use ideas, this campaign was able to reach up to ninety percent of all the teenage population of the United States. Moreover, the majority of those people were able to view the anti recreational drug use ads no less than four times a week.

Nonetheless, in spite of such tremendous success, some people believe that the Just Say No to recreational drug use advertising campaign is not a very good investment of the taxation money, as it is hardly enough to air some nicely sounding "Just Say No" slogan in order to stop young people from using drugs or fight such mass illegal and antisocial behavior. That was one of the reasons why this "Just Say No"  to recreational drug use advertising campaign faced some measure of criticism and satire, though many others believe that due to this campaign, many teens and young people were saved and warned against going into drugs.