For example, I sometimes smoke "socially", sometimes up to half a pack during a night out. I never perceived it as "catastrophic", just as you say people don't perceive not sleeping enough as catastrophic. I would bet a lot of people don't feel like dying after smoking a cigarette or ten. The point is that maybe those campaigns do work, even when the issue isn't perceived as "critical" by the people. It could be launched as an education campaign, for the long haul.
Another thing which helped me a lot with sleep quality is exercise. And this is something for which there already are campaigns, at least in France, and from what I see it becomes more and more common to see people advocating for it. However, I don't see those campaigns talk about the effect of exercise on sleep.
When I started lifting some weights (nothing much, just a bunch of dumbbell exercises in my apartment) and going for short, light runs (around 30 minutes around my neighborhood) I noticed my sleep quality had improved enormously. A few weeks in, I actually started to sleep less than before. Went from around 7-8 hours and having a hard time waking up to around 6 hours and waking up refreshed and without an alarm.
So what I found out was that exercise actually turned out to be "free" from a time standpoint. But the overall levels of energy during the day went through the roof. Of course, the first two to three weeks were hard, especially waking up in the morning, but it was worth it.
I personally don't agree. For pretty much all the people I know who won't sleep enough (that is, most of the people I known), it falls into the more general problem of health hygiene denial:
While the second is certainly a serious problem that needs a medical (in a broad sense) approach, I'm very skeptical about dealing effectively with the first.The negative effects of eating junk and smoking are extremely well known, and still, there's a large amount of people who do it.
Sleep deprivation on the other hand has obvious negative effects, buy they're not documented/perceived, in common culture, as being catastrophic (eg. you risk to die); it has also the perception of being a time waste, which conflicts with the busy requirements of a modern life.
Call me pessimistic, but I can hardly see a way to realistically (I stress "reastically") improve the situation on large scale (like smoke campaigns decrease smokers).