Woodkirk Stone
Public health researchers looking for new ways to persuade those who resist vaccines to get vaccinated against the coronavirus are looking to the strategies of the digital marketing industry to find a way to convince the reluctant.
Businesses that use online ads to sell products try out different colors, phrases, fonts, and a host of other variables to determine what resonates with consumers. So why not apply the same type of A / B testing to determine the best way to promote vaccines?
To this end, the United Nations Children’s Fund, The Public Good Projects and the Yale Institute for Global Health have teamed up to create the Vaccine Demand Observatory, which works with Facebook Inc. to help countries in the world. around the world to refine their calls to better instill confidence in the vaccine.
The work is critically important as the world grapples with the combined hurdles of the hyper-contagious delta variant, the slow roll-out of vaccines in some countries and the uptake ceiling in others, and it received new impetus after Pfizer Inc. and its partner BioNTech SE said their COVID-19 vaccine was safe and effective in children aged 5 to 11, findings that could pave the way for childhood vaccination of primary school in a few months.
Medical evidence clearly shows that vaccines are safe and effective in both curbing the spread of the virus and dramatically reducing the risk of hospitalization for the rare vaccinated people who contract COVID-19. Yet in the United States, where vaccines are widely available, about 25% of eligible adults have not been vaccinated.
The newly formed Vaccine Demand Observatory and Facebook are now building on experiments that ended earlier this year that tested how people respond to different types of vaccine messages. In this study, researchers showed vaccine-related content to over 100 million people on the social network in six countries, changing everything from the post itself to its tone, format and style, then analyzing engagement with content. They also surveyed both those who saw the ads and those who didn’t about their attitudes towards the vaccines to measure the difference the ads made. In this case, the message was to encourage parents to continue with routine immunizations for their children during the pandemic. It turned out that different couriers worked best depending on where they were deployed. In Ukraine, an informative tone did a better job of improving perceptions of immunization than emotional advocacy. In some countries, cartoons worked better than photos. In India, the most successful message was a personal call from a doctor explaining why he had vaccinated his own children. In Kenya, a simple message accompanied by an infographic with a recommended immunization schedule gave the best results. Elsewhere, taking a purely factual approach was ineffective, and tugging at the heartstrings worked better. The disparate results underscore the need to tailor messages to specific audiences.
“We need to test the efficacy and safety of our vaccine messages just as we test the efficacy and safety of our vaccines,” said Angus Thomson, a social science researcher at Unicef ​​who studies the demand for vaccines. .
It’s a frustrating conundrum for government officials and other health actors: it isn’t always enough to present the data to persuade someone on the fence to take the vaccine. The problem is that often the facts are not really the cause of concern. Research has shown that often the blockage is actually a lack of trust in public health authorities or governments. Misinformation about side effects or secret trackers just helps confirm the worldviews a person already has. Just giving people more data or cleaning up social media of all their misinformation will never completely solve this problem. In practice, this can backfire on you. In one study, when the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention’s flu vaccine messages were tested among concerned people, it reduced their intention to vaccinate while dispelling myths about the vaccine. Another found similar trends in messages to parents about the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.
“There are many social, psychological and political reasons why people can adopt anti-vaccine attitudes,” said Matt Motta, a political scientist who studies vaccine reluctance at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. . “And so that means we have to make a lot of different communication arguments to try to reach people. “
Often, however, these reasons boil down to a lack of confidence, whether in science itself, government, or the healthcare system. This is part of why the tone of a message is just as important as the content. The trick is knowing which tone to hit.
This is where the Vaccine Demand Observatory tries to make a dent. The group is in the process of replicating the initial experiment with more scientific rigor, testing the content in four countries. The best performing materials will then be compared to standard messages in randomized trials to measure outcomes such as vaccination coverage rates.
“Preliminary data shows that very different approaches can work in different audiences,†Thompson said. In one country, messages that included trusted messengers like health workers or parents, but also emphasized freedom, were tested positively. In another, it was personal testimonials referring to everyone having a fair chance of being protected by vaccines. The Vaccine Demand Observatory also supports countries with tools to monitor social media posts about vaccines to understand local opinions about them. In this new experiment, messages are crafted based on information the group already understands based on social listening efforts in a particular country, as well as behavioral information. A marketing research team suggests what might work well based on the cultural information and messages already in circulation, a production team strives to identify and replicate the visual aspect of successful content in a region, then a creative team comes up with messages based on it all. .
In the Philippines, for example, researchers have focused particularly on testing messages that correspond to different values, such as freedom, autonomy, and the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. In most cases, the freedom messages have been the most successful.
“The effect sizes that we’re seeing for metrics like click-through rates, message retention, and some key survey questions are really impressive and would make a large retail company very, very happy with their multi-year campaigns. million dollars, â€said Thomson. So far, what the group has found corresponds to something academic studies have long suggested about vaccine messages that are rarely put into practice: Concerns about vaccines stem from a variety of root causes. the concerns of a particular group or community. What works in Kenya could backfire on India.
Motta, of Oklahoma State University, said these types of A / B tests for vaccine messages are the “gold standard for assessing which messages tend to be most effective in vaccine-skeptical populations.” . In her own research, Motta and her colleagues tested three approaches to increasing Covid vaccine intent in the United States. They found that messages emphasizing the personal health risks and collective health consequences of not immunizing significantly increased Americans’ vaccination intentions, with no difference depending on a person’s political party.
But in the United States, some messages might work differently in Arkansas than they would in Idaho, two states where there are large pockets of vaccine reluctance, but different cultural values ​​that might make them. underpin.
Sometimes disinformation succeeds because it addresses concerns that are otherwise left unanswered by official sources – this has been especially true over the past year and a half, a time filled with a lot of uncertainty. By not taking these concerns seriously, public health often loses public trust. “We should value and invest in public trust as much as we value and invest in vaccines,†said Thomson. “Because without any public trust, there is no public immunity. “
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