The Publicity Division received a considerable boost when David Ford replaced Nigel Watt as Director in September 1972. Having arrived in Hong Kong on a military posting in the aftermath of the 1967 disturbances, Ford remained on secondment to ISD and later resigned from the army to join the information grade. He relished the challenge of community building.

In step with the gathering momentum of social development in Hong Kong was the introduction, in 1972, of the first of many major publicity campaigns with which ISD set out to inculcate and foster a sense of civic pride in the newly self-aware community. Arthur Hacker came up with the design for an emblematic 'public enemy number one' of the new Keep Hong Kong Clean Campaign, in the form of Lap Sap Chung, the litterbug.

A green, long-snouted monster with red spots and a forked tail, Lap Sap Chung was supposed to be repulsive but ended up looking almost endearingly naughty instead. This despite the fact that an early poster for the campaign - and one which prompted great demand - shows him looming, gigantic and Godzilla-like, above the city skyline, poised to trash the metropolis. Happily his advent coincided with the rapid inroads of broadcast television services into every home in Hong Kong, so that, even though his anti-social behaviour was not to be emulated, he became an instantly recognisable icon of the new age.

His creator, 'Frankenstein' Hacker, ruefully comments on Lap Sap Chung fever in Hong Kong in Posters, published by ISD many years after the event: "The litterbug, Lap Sap Chung, and Miss Super Clean were both launched at the same time and promoted equally. Miss Super Clean soon dropped out of the picture, but Lap Sap Chung became a folk villain. For the 'Year of the Rabbit' a white bunny called Siu Pak To (Litte White Rabbit) was introduced to counteract the villainous litterbug. Once again evil triumphed."

Television in fact became the principal medium for getting the message across, and here the groundwork laid by Nigel Watt, in formulating the licensing conditions under which the television stations were to operate, proved invaluable in securing generous allocations of free air time for announcements of public interest.

When the Keep Hong Kong Clean campaign targeted public beaches in 1975, ISD came up with the idea of forming Clean Your City groups, comprising your children who would adopt particular beaches and, through their volunteer efforts, compete for the honour of achieving the cleanest. The project proved so successful that, at year's end, ISD succeeded in encouraging the Education Department to preserve both the concept and the acronym by establishing Community Youth Clubs on a permanent basis.

For the Fight Crime campaign, launched to enlist public support for a crackdown on crime, Hacker devised a symbol of a broken dagger. This was followed by numerous other logos, targeting the different strategies employed by the Police in later phases of this campaign.

Since designing the look of a campaign only marked the first phase of ISD's involvement, a new sub-division was formed to follow up with the intricate logistical work entailed in devising and coordinating various public activities and events, with the help of city district offices, schools, auxiliary forces and voluntary services.

This 'bread and circuses' entourage had to fly largely by the seats of its pants, making it up as it went along. Among its early graduates were Ted Thomas, who soon moved on to form his own independent public relations consultancy, Gillian Newson, now a theatrical agent for some of the world's better known opera singers and orchestras, and Bill Yim, the popular cartoonist who was commissioned to design and operate a troupe of puppets for a mobile theatre.

Mounted on a flat-bed truck, for rapid deployment in factory precincts and housing estate playgrounds, the mobile theatre used lights, loudspeakers, hired talent and a pastiche of variety acts and social dramas heavily laced with public service messages. One reader wrote her Chinese newspaper to complain of the high decibels of this 'obligatory entertainment' - but that was in the days before ISD launched its Environmental Protection campaign which emphasised noise as a contributory element of social ills.

Supporting the television APIs and posters was a wide range of print material, including leaflets and explanatory booklets explaining the objectives of each campaign and the role the public could play. Quickly sensing how their own targets might be attained with the help of such campaign treatment, heads of departments competed vigorously for the mounting funds allocated to ISD each year for an ever-expanding range of programmes.

In turn, Road Safety, Fire Prevention, the Anti-Narcotics and Anti-Smoking drives, AIDS education, Industrial Safety, Home Safety, Recreational Safety, Child Abuse prevention, Metrication and Voter Registration all got the campaign treatment. With a host of other topics calling so heavily on public service airtime the broadcasting media were obliged to provide, the Publicity Division had to produce monthly schedules mapping out time slots for each message.

ISD's growing publicity apparatus came in particularly handy at a time when the government was developing new satellite towns in the New Territories, and facing resistance from a populace wary of moving into them. Inroads into the no longer 'new' territories had taken on greater urgency in the '70s. By the middle of the decade the Housing Authority's long-term development programme envisaged that at least half of the new projects would be located there, principally in the new towns of Tsuen Wan, Sha Tin and Tuen Mun. But planning and building these new towns was one thing. Getting people to inhabit them was another.

While the comforts of domesticity were assuming greater importance in the minds of Hong Kong residents, most still held home to be subordinate to workplace, and believed that a minimum distance should separate the two. On the other side of the Kowloon range lay rustic backwoods one might venture into - if time permitted - for a Sunday outing. But they were no place in which to work or live.

The skills brought to bear in breaking down this resistance, and encouraging the exodus of pioneering new town settlers, became part of the new motivational armoury of ISD. Investors had also to be wooed for the new industrial areas that would form the employment base for these new populations, and housing, schools, social and commercial amenities and public utilities had to be developed in parallel - all of them dependent on ease of transportation and none of them likely to work unless ordinary families could be prevailed upon to take up residence there. Heavily involved in this programme was Kerry McGlynn, newly-recruited to ISD from Australia.