The Challenge
Despite widespread availability, many Americans feel skeptical of the fast production and technology used to produce COVID-19 vaccines. With an influx of both factual and invalid resources, many Americans are not sure what to believe or where to turn for answers. The Ad Council, a national nonprofit organization focused on driving change around America’s most pressing social issues, took on its most significant effort yet: inspiring confidence in the COVID-19 vaccines among Americans. The massive communications initiative led with a new campaign, “It’s Up To You,” focused on guiding Americans to GetVaccinceAnswers.org for the latest information. The primary goal was to address the concerns of millions of Americans and move the needle on vaccinations against COVID-19. Given the critical and lofty goals of the initiative, the Ad Council knew that measuring success would be complicated.
About the Ad Council
Ad Council is a national nonprofit organization that has been around for 80+ years focusing on addressing the largest social issues within the country. Familiar campaigns include Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk, Smokey Bear and Love Has No Labels.
“The COVID-19 vaccines have the potential to transform life as we know it today and save hundreds of thousands of lives—but they can only be successful if millions of Americans recognize the urgency, safety and vital importance of getting vaccinated.” – The Ad Council
Solution
A communications agency, Bully Pulpit Interactive, recommended Lucid Impact Measurement by Cint based on the ability to measure upper funnel metrics in real-time in a flexible, modern platform and provide actionable, cross-platform data to optimize media while a campaign is running. Based on their recommendation, the Ad Council moved forward with measuring their programmatic media campaign with Lucid Impact Measurement.
Cint surveyed respondents to measure attitudinal changes among those who were exposed to the campaign; the goal was to help identify the creative and messaging that provides the most value and lift. Due to the flexibility of Lucid Impact Measurement, Cint’s brand lift product, the Ad Council was able to drill down into specific demographic cuts and understand the creative and messaging that drove the most mindset changes.
Key Findings
By utilizing Lucid Impact Measurement, the Ad Council gained an understanding of which creative messaging has the intended effect on their selected audiences. The data visualizations in Lucid Impact Measurement clearly identify top-performing segments. It also allows data to be viewed and sliced in various ways to learn how an audience’s mindset shifts.
Based on responses, the Ad Council identified a key “open but uncertain” audience where it would be possible to build confidence through education. Individuals within this group were receptive to fact-based messaging and were most likely to be more confident after seeing the campaign. These respondents mainly lived in politically-moderate zip codes and heavily skewed females.
Results
Liz DeAngelis, VP, Growth & Managed Platforms at the Ad Council, explained during a 2021 Advertising Week NY panel: “Media planning can be very assumptive, but utilizing Lucid [Impact Measurement] provided granularity that helped reallocate resources to those audiences that can be impacted.”* Through these real-time insights, the Ad Council was able to make a more informed case for allocating their marketing dollars and deciding which audience their messaging should be focused on.
The Ad Council leveraged insights from Lucid Impact Measurement to uncover which set of creative messages had the biggest impact on a vaccine hesitant audience. Specifically, they noticed a 2x greater lift among females for their “first step” creative messaging. As a result, they shifted budget for Q3 to increase impressions with that theme of messaging to their female target audience.
They also found that lift increased significantly for those between the ages of 45-54 when compared to 25-34. So, they increased spend on their target audiences within that age group to optimize the impact of the campaign. Finally, based on the granular cross-platform data provided in Lucid Impact Measurement, they have funneled additional support to CTV to retarget these audiences in a premium video environment. With the insights gathered for this campaign, the Ad Council plans to measure more of their upper-funnel campaigns with Lucid Impact Measurement to continue the work toward COVID-19 vaccine education.
