The National Library of Medicine admits to nudging people to vaccinate through online advertising

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

Many may not know this, but the majority of my education (graduate and postgraduate) is focused on the science of psychology. To be honest, it is my secret superpower and one of the reasons why my duty is to educate the larger community. There are aspects of our society, dark secrets that are kept from the large majority and for good reason.

Psychology is not only a tool to better understand those around you—it can also lead to increased influence on others. While these persuasion skills are typically put toward research or therapeutic settings, they can also be useful in fields outside of the direct psychology world, such as marketing and advertising.

Encouraging people to vaccinate was a challenging endeavour. This was stated in an article titled, “Vaccine advertising: preach to the converted or to the unaware,” published on the National Library of Medicine website. They saw it as an endeavour, which has tremendous public health benefits. Doing so requires overcoming barriers of awareness, availability, and (sometimes) vaccine hesitancy.

In the article they state clearly, “Here we focus on nudging people to vaccinate through online advertising.” Please re-read this sentence and take in the fact that they are very aware that they have been selling the vaccine to us.

They found that ads had 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. This means that most commercial vaccine advertising is aimed entirely at this population.

Second, they 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, and more often, search for the vaccine later.

They conclude that the 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 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.

Yes, the vaccine strategy was well thought out.

In another study titled, “Online advertising as a public health and recruitment tool: comparison of different media campaigns to increase demand for smoking cessation interventions” they demonstrated the feasibility of: online advertising as a strategy to increase consumer demand for smoking cessation treatments, illustrated the tools that can be used to track and evaluate the impact of online advertising on treatment utilization, and highlighted some of the methodological challenges and future directions for researchers.

They found that powerful targeting capabilities of online advertising presents new opportunities to reach subgroups of the population who may not respond to other forms of advertising.

Now, that we have discussed the theory, let me share the methodology, what you can consider the practical rollout:

1. The Reciprocity Principle

This social psychology principle describes the give and take relationship between humans. When you give someone something, you put a burden on them to want to pay you back. For example, if you would like your freedom, you are going to have to follow our rules, “Take the vaccine, and life will go back to normal.”

2. Commitment

When businesses can make a customer commit to something small, they can then easily increase their ask to include bigger things. For example, “If you take the vaccine, life will go back to normal. Wait! You have to take one more shot, okay, now a booster…”

3. Consensus

People are more likely to buy from businesses when there is demonstrated proof that other individuals have made purchases and put trust in the company. By simply providing target audiences with reviews or testimonials, advertisers are taking advantage of this psychological principle. The world governments said that the vaccine was safe and effective, so why are you questioning this?

4. Authority

People tend to pay more attention if they see that a company is an authority figure in the industry. Here are a few ways advertisers showcase authority to help build trust with consumers:

• Publish a healthy flow of authoritative, industry-specific content to establish thought-leadership (Government ads).
• Visible mentions of awards or badges to tout many years of experience (Chief Medical Officer’s, Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates, etc).
• Trusted team of influencers to showcase a product or service on the company’s behalf (The many celebrities who endorsed getting the vaccine). 

They say it has been challenging, but to be honest with the high vaccination rates around the world, it looks like they got the science down.