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When the World Health Organization announced the spread of a dangerous infodemic alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, We Defend Truth developed one of the most impactful vaccine advertising campaigns to date.

2022 Vaccine Campaign

The Problem

Amidst the worst pandemic in a century, we were suffering from an infodemic — misinformation about the disease and its life-saving vaccine.

The Solution

We developed an effective and creative political advertising campaign using an audience-first approach that leveraged culturally-compelling content to bring new insights to even the most skeptic.

“The most successful campaign I’ve seen at any point in the last four years” – Philipp Tsipman, Founder & CEO of Outfox AI

The COVID vaccination campaign aimed to break through vaccine disinformation and connect with populations with the highest vaccine hesitancy. The campaign centered around deeply executed creative and creative content testing, which yielded some of the highest engagement performance metrics that our media technology partner, Outfox AI, has ever seen in political advertising. We successfully engaged audiences previously considered out-of-reach, demonstrating that with the right targeting strategy and content, we could make an impact on this now contentious issue. 

Audience

The campaign focused on two populations with the highest vaccine hesitancy: white, rural conservatives and Blacks in urban areas. The testing showed very different results between content appealing to rural White and urban Black audiences — demonstrating the necessity of executing diverse and precisely targeted approaches to persuasion this fall. Overall, the campaign performance was similar with urban Black and rural White voters, reaching over 2.2 million people total. 

Vaccine campaign highlights

With an ad spend of just $77,250, our recent vaccine campaign outperformed Stanford University’s successful effort ($1 spent = 1 vaccine from vaccine-resistant communities) by over 31%, demonstrating the power of our tested approach.

Vaccine campaign viral gifs

Takeaways

Our creative approach reveals the power of truth, compassion, humility and diversity of content in a persuasion campaign regarding a highly controversial topic. Using the voices of credible messengers within a specific community is key to breaking through pre-established mental barriers. The content used was most effective when it looked and acted like the type of content that targeted audiences are already familiar with and trust.

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We can win our fellow citizens back from the darkest corners of the internet and give truth the digital ally it desperately needs.

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