Facebook : Creative Best Practices for COVID-19 Vaccine Campaigns

We are supporting government and nonprofit organizations around the world to provide accurate information about and increase confidence in coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines. Many of the organizations we support use Brand Lift studies to determine if their campaigns influence perceptions around the safety and efficacy of vaccines. We recently completed an analysis of these Brand Lift Studies in order to identify best practices and characteristics of top-performing content.

As you continue to communicate important information about COVID-19 vaccinations and booster shots, consider these six creative best practices to help you have greater impact on your audience*:

Feature trusted messengers: Campaigns that feature trusted messengers are more likely to resonate with audiences. Trusted messengers could vary by the target audience, and may include health professionals, celebrities, community leaders or others. For example, CARE US developed and tested assets that featured health workers, faith leaders and celebrities to determine which messengers were most likely to influence their target audience.

Engage audiences immediately: Successful campaigns often start with a question or statement that immediately engages their audience, e.g. "How do we know the COVID vaccines are safe?" Or, "If I had COVID, do I need to be vaccinated?" Consider putting a question or key message at the beginning of a video to draw audiences in and use text overlay for static images. For example, KFF's (Kaiser Family Foundation's) THE CONVERSATION / LA CONVERSACIÓN features healthcare workers answering common questions about COVID-19 vaccines.

Hone in on a key topic and reflect this in your creative assets: Our meta-analysis showed that high-performing campaigns focused on one topic or at most, a few related ones (e.g., COVID-19 myth-busting). Therefore, consider focusing on a specific topic or issue, rather than diluting messaging across many different topics, which may confuse your audience. If you want to communicate a range of messages, consider splitting them across different ad campaigns.

Balance video and static: Our meta-analysis showed that campaigns that combine video and static content tend to perform better than video-only campaigns.

Simplify and shorten content: We found that short videos are generally more effective than longer ones. Campaigns with information that was easy to process and understand also performed better than highly technical content. For example, Direct Relief developed three short creatives to build confidence in vaccines, all of which were under 15 seconds in length.

Mobile-optimized assets: Our analysis showed that ads that were most effective for mobile viewing were those that were designed specifically for mobile, e.g. with sound off or cropped to fit a mobile screen..Ensure all assets are mobile-optimized to help capture attention and allow easy viewing on a mobile device.

Keeping these best practices in mind can help government and nonprofit organizations develop more impactful ads and connect more effectively with their audiences. The complete meta-analysis can be downloaded here and includes media planning best practices, in addition to the creative recommendations above.

*Note: These recommendations are based on the statistical analysis of 143 advertising campaigns run globally between December 2020 and June 2021 and a qualitative creative analysis of top performing campaigns. Our findings closely mirror results from a previous meta-analysis conducted of COVID-19 prevention advertising campaigns.