COVID management was a challenge in the US, with various confrontations between science and politics. There was an added element of crisis fueled by racial divergence of the population. American Medical Association (AMA), in a June 2020 statement pointed out that Black US residents were disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
J-PAL took this opportunity to do a research to ascertain what kind of messaging worked among various strata of population. There were two sets of research. The first one was designed to promote basic awareness about the disease, preventive methods like masks, social distancing and handwash. Messages were given by doctors of varied age, gender and race. Most messages were simple instructions, but some were tailored with a political slant of black population being more affected by the pandemic.
Results are interesting. The first experiment showed that messages transmitted by doctors were more effective and reduced knowledge gap. Interestingly, the research clearly showed that effectiveness had no bias towards recipient or transmitters gender and race. Even more interesting was the fact that effect of the message had no bias towards recipient’s political orientation when messages were given by doctors.
The second experiment was messages from doctors urging people not to travel during Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, similarly by varied age, gender and race, but each message with different reason for staying home.
The campaign videos were run through Facebook in 420 counties in the US, and engaged participants movements were recorded through their mobile phone locations. Infection rates were compared post-holiday between control and intervention zip codes. The result shows lesser incidents of infection and holiday travel in the intervention localities.
At DamageControl, we designed the video format, shooting instructions as all videos were recorded by mobile cameras by the doctors themselves. Then they were edited with permutations and combinations of messages. We made some 300 odd videos of an average of 45 seconds each. This exercise was done during COVID lockdown and the operation spanned between Paris, Boston and 2 locations in New Delhi. The game was not much of creativity, but about being absolutely right.