Vaccine advertising: preach to the converted or to the unaware?

Abstract

Encouraging people to vaccinate is a challenging endeavor, but one which has tremendous public health benefits. Doing so requires overcoming barriers of awareness, availability, and (sometimes) vaccine hesitancy. Here we focus on nudging people to vaccinate through online advertising. We conducted a pre-registered online ads campaign encouraging people to vaccinate against three diseases: influenza, human papillomavirus, and herpes zoster. Ads were shown to ~69,000 people and were compared to similar ads shown to 8.6 million people. Outcome measures were clicks on ads and future searches for relevant terms. We find that ads have two main effects: First, a congruence effect whereby ads increase the likelihood of clicks and future searches by up to 116% in people who express an interest in the disease or the vaccine. Most commercial vaccine advertising is aimed entirely at this population. Second, we observed a priming effect, where ads shown to people who were searching for terms unrelated to the vaccine could be encouraged to click on them (odds ratios of 7.5–33.0) and, more often, search for the vaccine later (hazard ratios of 6.9–157.3). We provide analysis for optimizing vaccine advertising campaign budgets to balance the two populations. These findings demonstrate that digital advertising campaigns should consider not just advertising to direct keywords or to individuals that look exactly like existing customers, but consider tangential keywords that draw a wider target population who are likely earlier in their conversion funnel, thus increasing the number of people who vaccinate and maximizing vaccines uptake.

Changing Perspectives on Pediatric Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccination among Dental Students and Residents Reveals Recent Increase in Vaccine Hesitancy

“…One of the most important of these is the study population, which consisted of highly educated graduatelevel students and postgraduate residents. However, although vaccine hesitancy may be higher among the general population, the growing trend of vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers and graduate healthcare students suggests that more active engagement and direct interventions may be necessary to connect all segments of the population with scientific knowledge and evidence-based information [40,41]. Another important consideration is the retrospective nature of this study, which has analyzed previously collected data and was not able to provide more in-depth information about socioeconomic factors or socio-cultural information that might provide more opportunities for evaluating and assessing the causes for these shifts in vaccination beliefs and attitudes [42,43].…”

Establish grassroots genomics and bioinformatics programs to train 400 Africans yearly

“…One final benefit of the 2023 AfricaBP Open Institute regional workshops to industry sponsors is the targeted visibility (see Additional texts 1 in supplementary) it provides to partnering institutions and corporations. For example, by partnering with AfricaBP Open Institute, industry sponsors were able to reach 3,788 registered participants and 10,756 viewers across AfricaBP's social media channels such as YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) (Figure 5, 6 and 7), compared to TV commercials that could have cost more (Bayer, et al, 2020, Krupenkin, et al, 2021, Dwivedi, et al, 2021.…”