Unicef wields digital marketing tools to battle vaccine hesitancy

With the Delta variant continuing to drive surges in COVID-19 infections
across the world, nations as well as global health organisations are striving
to inspire greater confidence in vaccines and surmount vaccine hesitancy in
populations. To that end, the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has tied
up with The Public Good Projects and the Yale Institute for Global Health to
create a Vaccine Demand Observatory. The ‘observatory’ is working with Facebook
to help nations improve vaccine messaging through tools typically used for
digital marketing.

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The Vaccine Demand Observatory is building on experiments that were done
earlier this year that showed how different people responded to different kinds
of messaging on vaccinations. As part of the experiments, researchers
conducting the study showed vaccine-related information to 100 million Facebook
users across six countries. The researchers tweaked their content in terms of
tone, format and style and analysed engagement. They also tried to find out who
saw those ads and who did not and analysed the perspectives of people who did
not see the ads.

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As it turned out, different messaging did have different impacts on
audiences. In India, for example, the best-performing message was a personal
appeal by a doctor talking about why he vaccinated his own kids. In the
Ukraine, an informative tone worked better at improving vaccine perceptions
instead of emotional pleas. In Kenya, straightforward messaging with an infographic
worked the best. There were places where just putting out the facts worked and
there were others where one had to pull at heart strings.

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Angus Thomson, a social scientist at UNICEF studying vaccine demand, told
Bloomberg, “We need to test our vaccine messaging for efficacy and safety.”

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Governments across the world are battling vaccine hesitancy in one form
or another. One of the aspects of vaccine hesitancy that researchers have come
across is that frequently the hang-up is due to a lack of trust in public
institutions. The Vaccine Research Observatory is looking to fight off this
distrust by adopting newer methods of marketing to get more people vaccinated
against COVID-19.