It's Up To You — Vaccine Hestitancy Campaign

The "It's up to you" COVID-19 vaccine education initiative

The Ad Council is a public interest advertising association, with the mission to use the power of communications to tackle the most pressing issues facing the country. It is responsible for creating many of the most famous public service announcements (PSAs) of our time, such as Smokey Bear, and “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.”

Ad Council | COVID Collaborative

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The “It’s up to you” campaign is the Ad Council’s COVID-19 Vaccine Education Initiative. It is recognized as one of, if not the biggest, public service campaigns in U.S. history.

The vaccines available in the United States have been provided at no cost to the individuals, and offer effective protection against the coronavirus. However, they are also proving to be hard to sell because of a complexity of factors involving politics, religion, race, class, and education. This ‘vaccine hesitancy’ potentially prevents the nation from reaching herd immunity.

We worked closely with Ad Council and Love Has No Labels to extend the PSA video into a campaign that adapts to different media formats. The full page newspaper ad placements pull direct quotes from the individuals in the video to tell their stories boldly in print.

“Regardless of the miraculous development and heroic efforts of the pharmaceutical community, the medical community, if people weren’t willing to take the vaccines, we were not going to be any further along.”

- Lisa Sherman, President of the Ad Council*

“Regardless of the miraculous development and heroic efforts of the pharmaceutical community, the medical community, if people weren’t willing to take the vaccines, we were not going to be any further along.”

- Lisa Sherman, President of the Ad Council*

The Ad Council is tackling vaccine hesitancy head on with a massive integrated campaign, and Ready State’s role is to help them with the volume of creative assets needed to feed their media plan, and creative stimuli necessary to find messaging that really works.

We worked closely with Ad Council and Love Has No Labels to extend the PSA video into a campaign that adapts to different media formats. The full page newspaper ad placements pull direct quotes from the individuals in the video to tell their stories boldly in print.

By leveraging our bionic workflow, Ready State was able to create a library of digital banners that the Ad Council could use for creative testing.

Ready State started by selecting the key questions people were concerned about from the campaign site, such as, “How do the COVID-19 vaccines protect me?”

Then we used a natural language A.I. to generate variations on the tone of voice to be more casual and more formal.

The social and display assets use stills of individuals from the video combined with the bold typography and messaging of the campaign to make a powerful statement online.

Ready State worked with Asian Health Services, a community health advocate for the medically underserved, to translate our ad copy into Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean.

The social and display assets use stills of individuals from the video combined with the bold typography and messaging of the campaign to make a powerful statement online.

Using our bionic workflow, we then rapidly created hundreds of ad variations that could test headlines, layout, visuals and talent, copy tone, and ad formats. Then we applied our heuristics to select those we believed would be the most emotionally resonant.

The immediate benefit was that we were able to help the Ad Council to better take advantage of the huge volume of programmatic ad inventory to investigate the connection between their messaging and audience responses based on addressable attributes for political orientation, religion, language, income, education, and geography.

As we learn more, we will continually create new challenger ads to further optimize the campaign’s creative performance.

The social and display assets use stills of individuals from the video combined with the bold typography and messaging of the campaign to make a powerful statement online.