OCCHD “Choose Today” Case Study

“It’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work, Oklahoma County!”

Freestyle Creative had the opportunity to partner with the Oklahoma City-County Health Department (OCCHD) and Gooden Group for “Choose Today,” an informative campaign about the FDA authorized COVID-19 vaccine for citizens of Oklahoma County, encouraging audiences to make an informed decision about receiving the vaccine.

Situation

Making the decision to get vaccinated can be tough, especially with factors such as underlying health conditions and age. OCCHD recognized that many residents of Oklahoma County needed help becoming informed about the best decision for themselves, or helping family and friends make an informed decision about becoming vaccinated.

Goals

Before starting this campaign, our team established three goals:

• Motivate unvaccinated Oklahoma County residents to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, with primary focus on OCCHD’s target populations, in order to limit community spread and improve overall public health outcomes.

• Reinforce the critical role that OCCHD plays in educating and providing resources to Oklahoma County.

• Emphasize the importance of receiving a second dose and booster vaccines.

Strategy

To effectively achieve these goals, we partnered with Amber Integrated, to conduct a pre-campaign survey to identify the creative direction and appropriate target audiences. From this research, we were able to identify the following target audiences:

• Males, ages 30-50

• Parents/guardians of children ages 5-11

• Vaccinated residents eligible for boosters
  

Within each of these audiences, we developed specific strategies. For example, we knew that general vaccine messaging would differ from second dose and booster vaccines. Messaging for parents and guardians of children eligible for the vaccination would naturally need to be different and more specialized than that for the general public.

So, how do you make a cohesive campaign trying to target various audiences and multiple goals?

For us, this came down to the heart of the campaign: “Choose Today.” Having a recognizable logo consistent in each piece of this campaign would help pull together these audiences and goals. For messaging, we used images that would resonate with each audience, and altered copy to speak to the goals.

Placement
“Choose Today” was a campaign all about reach, hoping to ultimately drive residents of Oklahoma County to VaxOKC.com to make an informed decision about vaccination. To achieve maximum reach, we created a mix of traditional and digital media.

Traditional media included multiple billboard designs to appeal to several target audiences, direct mail, two different spots run on broadcast television, and posters with OCCHD’s vaccination hotline and/or website depending on the design. Digital media included several ad groups with detailed targeting on Facebook with messaging varying with audiences, and programmatic placement for various videos with unique messaging for all three target audiences.

We established the need for multiple audiences, and discussed broad placement. Let’s dig in a little deeper to broadcast.

Broadcast was identified as one of the most successful placements we were able to secure. Throughout the campaign, we filmed three video concepts, all with a long and short form version. The topics were as followed:

• General vaccine awareness, featuring Oklahoma County healthcare professionals

• Kids’ vaccine awareness

• Booster vaccine awareness, featuring Oklahoma County healthcare professionals and other respected community leaders
  

Our strategy for broadcast placement was based off of two main target audiences: males 30-50 and parents/guardians of children ages 5-11. Based on this information, we bought into programs we felt beneficial to these audiences and day parted our flights to optimize times people would either be thinking about themselves or a significant other, versus children.

Results

When the campaign proposal was submitted, the vaccination rate in Oklahoma County was 45.9%. The “Choose Today” campaign launched early January, lasting through March 31. At the end of the campaign, 82.1% of Oklahoma County residents had received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 64.6% of residents were fully vaccinated.

Through our social media campaign, we tracked a 55% increase in traffic to VaxOKC.com just within the first week alone. Analyzing results, we were able to see positive trends in overall web traffic results through the remainder of the campaign with a significant decrease in bounce rate. During the campaign, over 90% of the web traffic was due to new visitors, while less than 10% were returning visitors.

Amber Integrated conducted a post-campaign survey similar to the initial survey for research and we found 40% of Oklahoma County residents recalled seeing an ad from OCCHD within the past 90 days. Of these 40%, 10% said it changed their perspective of the vaccine, while 28% said the advertisements gave them a more favorable view of OCCHD.