Putting pizazz in vaccine campaign
New Orleans adds local flavor to get the message out
The snap of the snare drums is insistent.
New Orleanians take joyous turns high-stepping and chicken strutting, dressed in the hand-sewn feathered finery of their social clubs and krewes. The celebration, shown on a new 30-second public service announcement airing in the city, is both resplendent and aching, an evocation of Carnival masking season that should have begun this month, culminating Feb. 16 with Mardi Gras. All of it canceled, of course, by the coronavirus pandemic.
Yet the spot is hopeful: To regain this and more, it exhorts, get vaccinated.
The advertisement is one of numerous efforts around the country to persuade people of the importance of getting a COVID-19 shot. But its homegrown approach, using neighborhood personas and invoking local culture with “laissez les bons temps rouler” dance moves and costumes, may make it particularly effective, say experts in vaccine hesitance and behavioral change.
“I’m getting the vaccine so we can have Mardi Gras, y’all!” shouts Jeremy Stevenson, a Monogram Hunter Mardi Gras Indian, also known as Second Chief Lil Pie, as he sways wildly in a 150-pound, 12-foot-tall tower of turquoise feathers and beading, beneath the Claiborne Avenue overpass, a well-known festival meet-up.
Other locals prance forth to offer their own reasons, concluding with the tagline: “Sleeves Up, NOLA!”
“I teared up several times and also just laughed out loud with delight. The sense of community is contagious,” said Alison Buttenheim, a vaccine behavioral expert at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.
“Vaccination is framed as a collective action that everyone can contribute to in order to bring back things the community values and cherishes,” added Buttenheim, the scientific director of the university’s Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics.
Although national vaccine hesitation rates are falling, surveys show that antipathy to the new shots is still widespread among some demographic groups, jeopardizing the goal of broad immunity.
Since the summer, public health officials and politicians repeatedly called for national pro-vaccination campaigns.
But no meaningful federal campaign has materialized, so concerned local officials have begun to develop their own publicity.
New Orleans may be best positioned to be at the forefront. Regularly battered by hurricanes, the city has an emergency management office practiced in public messaging.
Earlier in the pandemic, it devised a “Mask Up, NOLA!” slogan.
As the virus raced through neighborhoods, Laura Mellem, the city’s public engagement manager for its NOLA Ready program, was aware that it was hitting Black New Orleanians in starkly disproportionate numbers. Black people comprise some 60% of the city’s population but nearly 74% of its COVID-19 deaths.
“But the communities that are the most impacted by the virus are likely the most hesitant about the vaccine, because of the long-standing history of abuse against them in the name of science,” Mellem said.
In November, the city put together the Vaccine Equity and Communications Working Group, a coalition of high-profile public health doctors, faith leaders, leaders from Black, Latino and Vietnamese communities, and heads of the city’s large social clubs. The group filled out surveys, identifying cultural icons that would appeal to residents.
Rather than focusing messaging on the miseries wrought by the pandemic, Mellem said, they decided to emphasize an aspirational and inviting tone, a core insight derived from behavioral change research and urban thought leaders in cities like San Francisco. As Edward Maibach, a professor at George Mason University who studies public health messaging, writes, the most effective communications “make the behaviors we are promoting easy, fun and popular.”
“I’m getting my shot so I can visit my 92-year-old mom and we can eat in our favorite restaurants,” says Julie Nalibov of the Krewe of Red Beans, which helps the city’s stricken cultural performing artists, many of whom are over 70.
The social aid and pleasure clubs, which parade with brass-bands on Sundays and offer fellowship and volunteer service usually to Black communities, are represented by the all-female N’awlins Dawlins Baby Dolls, in satiny yellow dresses and parasols: “I’m getting the shot to protect my family!” says Trinette Pichon of the Dawlins, sashaying with a toddler on her hip.
The spot took scarcely an hour to shoot and about eight hours to edit. Because the videographer, Crista Rock, gave the city considerably reduced rates, the ad cost about $1,000 and will be shown on local TV stations and saturate social media. Still photos will adorn citywide billboards.
“I hope state and local health departments around the country can get resources to develop more hyperlocal campaigns. Imagine similar spots from Philly, or Boise, or Hawaii, or the Cherokee Nation,” Buttenheim said.