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Digital public health interventions at scale: The impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to COVID vaccines

Public health organizations increasingly use social media advertising campaigns in pursuit of public health goals. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of about $40 million of social media advertisements that were run and experimentally tested on Facebook and Instagram, aimed at increasing COVID-19...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Athey, Susan, Grabarz, Kristen, Luca, Michael, Wernerfelt, Nils
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: National Academy of Sciences 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9945974/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36701366
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208110120
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author Athey, Susan
Grabarz, Kristen
Luca, Michael
Wernerfelt, Nils
author_facet Athey, Susan
Grabarz, Kristen
Luca, Michael
Wernerfelt, Nils
author_sort Athey, Susan
collection PubMed
description Public health organizations increasingly use social media advertising campaigns in pursuit of public health goals. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of about $40 million of social media advertisements that were run and experimentally tested on Facebook and Instagram, aimed at increasing COVID-19 vaccination rates in the first year of the vaccine roll-out. The 819 randomized experiments in our sample were run by 174 different public health organizations and collectively reached 2.1 billion individuals in 15 languages. We find that these campaigns are, on average, effective at influencing self-reported beliefs—shifting opinions close to 1% at baseline with a cost per influenced person of about $3.41. Combining this result with an estimate of the relationship between survey outcomes and vaccination rates derived from observational data yields an estimated cost per additional vaccination of about $5.68. There is further evidence that campaigns are especially effective at influencing users’ knowledge of how to get vaccines. Our results represent, to the best of our knowledge, the largest set of online public health interventions analyzed to date.
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spelling pubmed-99459742023-02-23 Digital public health interventions at scale: The impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to COVID vaccines Athey, Susan Grabarz, Kristen Luca, Michael Wernerfelt, Nils Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A Social Sciences Public health organizations increasingly use social media advertising campaigns in pursuit of public health goals. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of about $40 million of social media advertisements that were run and experimentally tested on Facebook and Instagram, aimed at increasing COVID-19 vaccination rates in the first year of the vaccine roll-out. The 819 randomized experiments in our sample were run by 174 different public health organizations and collectively reached 2.1 billion individuals in 15 languages. We find that these campaigns are, on average, effective at influencing self-reported beliefs—shifting opinions close to 1% at baseline with a cost per influenced person of about $3.41. Combining this result with an estimate of the relationship between survey outcomes and vaccination rates derived from observational data yields an estimated cost per additional vaccination of about $5.68. There is further evidence that campaigns are especially effective at influencing users’ knowledge of how to get vaccines. Our results represent, to the best of our knowledge, the largest set of online public health interventions analyzed to date. National Academy of Sciences 2023-01-26 2023-01-31 /pmc/articles/PMC9945974/ /pubmed/36701366 http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208110120 Text en Copyright © 2023 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Social Sciences
Athey, Susan
Grabarz, Kristen
Luca, Michael
Wernerfelt, Nils
Digital public health interventions at scale: The impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to COVID vaccines
title Digital public health interventions at scale: The impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to COVID vaccines
title_full Digital public health interventions at scale: The impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to COVID vaccines
title_fullStr Digital public health interventions at scale: The impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to COVID vaccines
title_full_unstemmed Digital public health interventions at scale: The impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to COVID vaccines
title_short Digital public health interventions at scale: The impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to COVID vaccines
title_sort digital public health interventions at scale: the impact of social media advertising on beliefs and outcomes related to covid vaccines
topic Social Sciences
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9945974/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36701366
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208110120
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