• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Click here for a new type of :30 audio ad: a live in-flight PSA done by a high school senior advocating for lung cancer screenings.

This all began last January when Soneesh Kothagundla, a national director of the American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative (ALCSI), a student-led nonprofit, asked a flight attendant to read a prepared announcement on the subject. He told Pharma & Health Insider he was inspired by someone from the White Ribbon Project, another lung cancer screening nonprofit, who had gotten an attendant to read a similar PSA.

But Kothagundla’s flight attendant suggested that he take the intercom and do it himself.

The 17-year-old has now done six of them, with the effort spawning something of a movement under the hashtag #FlightPSA.

Several other people whom Kothagundla knows about -- and undoubtedly others -- have now done similar Live PSAs for their own individual causes ranging from mental health to environmental issues, he said.

The momentum from the in-flight announcements and related social postings also helped fuel an ALCSI outdoor ad campaign. It began in March on bus shelters and billboards in such markets as Atlanta, Las Vegas and Charlotte, with space donated by Outfront Media and Lamar Advertising, in addition to some paid ads.

“Over age 50? Ever smoke? Lung Screening may save your life,” read a sample OOH, with bus shelter ads created by Outfront and billboards by Kothagundla himself. “I realized there were a lot of billboards about vaping and smoking and stuff,” he recalled, “so why don’t we have billboards about lung cancer screening?”

Results have included 80 million-plus impressions from 50 bus shelters in Las Vegas; 2M+ Impressions from Outfront billboards in Atlanta, and another 2.67 million impressions from other billboards in Atlanta, Charlotte, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. northwest Arkansas, and Proctor, Minnesota.

And now, continuing his very busy year, Kothagundla has written  the book “Fasten Your Seatbelt: We're Changing the World,” which he described as “ a practical guide for young people who want to turn ideas into movements. It covers everything from getting started with research in high school to navigating policy change and building an online presence — all drawn from what I've learned building this movement from scratch.”

Self-published a month ago today, promoted by Kothagundla largely via LinkedIn and Instagram, and available via Amazon, the book is “more of a playbook than a memoir,” he said.

The book ends with 10 “toolkit” tips for others looking to follow Kothagundla’s path, so we asked him if he could share a couple of them.

One tip,  is “find a minimal viable action -- one thing you can do in under an hour -- and then you turn that thing into a movement."

Another tip: “Being young is actually an advantage, because it’s a surprise factor.”

Kothagundla also revealed to Pharma & Health Insider that the juvenile courts in Forsyth County, Georgia, where he resides, are planning to add the book as a “restorative sentencing option.”

So, with all this success, does Kothagundla, who’s already been accepted into Georgia Tech and is still applying to other colleges, plan to make health advocacy or even marketing into a career?

While he may major in health policy along with neuroscience or biology, he said his present goal is to become first a thoracic surgeon and  then, “hopefully, or eventually, the U.S. Surgeon General.”

That position has been empty since last January, but President Trump has nominated Casey Means for the position. Unlike Kothagundla’s career path, Means, cofounder of continuous glucose monitor marketer Levels and a leader in Robert F. Kennedy’s “Make American Healthy Again” movement, has no active medical license and never completed her surgical residency.