Making and testing a novel vaccine these days is only half the battle. Educating and advocating for a vaccine’s use is equally critical to eradicating disease. Advertising vaccines has become essential in the go-to-market effort for these life-saving interventions. Pfizer set this trend in 2015 with its first-ever TV spot for Prevnar 13, the pneumococcal vaccine. Another leading brand, Gardasil, uses vaccine advertising to educate parents and young teens on HPV vaccination.  

Vaccine advertising often meets with five categories of challenges: channel, audience, availability, receptiveness, and cohesion. The following best practices, organized according to these five challenges, can help overcome the challenges and drive increased vaccination rates. 

Challenge #1: Channel 

Depending on the vaccine, channel needs will vary. For novel vaccines, introduction and education are just as critical as brand identification and awareness. Linear TV ads are a common solution for this challenge, but they can increase the pain from the other challenges (more on this below).

Best practices: 

• Explore connected TV (CTV), an increasingly popular choice for vaccine advertising—thanks to its often large screen, longer ad formats, and ability to tell stories like linear TV but with more control over targeting.
• Consider digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising, which equips vaccine education and ads with a local, “in-the-community” feeling. One of this channel’s advantages is the ability to place ads near places of clinical importance, like pharmacies, medical facilities, and hospitals.  
• Leverage social media advertising, which has undergone policy updates to improve vaccine advertising since the spread of misinformation during COVID-19. TikTok and Facebook have policies restricting paid ads with anti-vaccine messaging.

Challenge #2: Audience

Finding the appropriate audience for a vaccine can be particularly challenging.  Traditional advertising in print, linear TV, and radio certainly achieves reach, but this often comes with significant waste. When broad reach is used, ads may be delivered to areas with below-average receptiveness to vaccines, or to areas where the incidence rate is too low to drive significant impact.

Best practice:

• Activate digital channels to enable more sophisticated targeting. For example, clinical data from health data providers can point to areas of low and high incidence, while retail pharmacy data can identify areas of low and high vaccination rates. When this data is applied to a dynamic audience model, marketers can direct media spend to specific zip codes where higher incidence rates coincide with lower vaccination rates. This reduces waste and provides opportunities to customize creative messaging. 

Challenge #3: Availability

A huge problem during the COVID-19 pandemic was that, while the volume of vaccine media coverage was extremely high, the availability of doses for distribution was comparatively low. 

Best practice:

• Coordinate geographic distribution with the marketing team’s geographic advertising efforts while the vaccine is being manufactured. As updated incidence and vaccination data become available, be sure to coordinate advertising and distribution changes. 

Challenge #4: Receptiveness

A big challenge with marketing vaccines, especially in the US, is battling misinformation and preconceived notions about vaccine safety. 

Best practices:

• Dynamic targeting can provide a path through misinformation. Manufacturers can apply modeled audiences that account for geographic areas shown to be less receptive to vaccine messaging. Then, brands can vary their ad creative to speak to less receptive and more receptive audiences differently. 
• Vary creative messaging dynamically. For example, less prescriptive messaging shown tangentially to consumers not actively seeking vaccine information can influence their future intent to learn about vaccines.(1) This tactic can be applied through search, display, video, CTV and native ad channels in areas less receptive to vaccine advertising.
• Appeal to your audience’s identity. In a study from Stanford University, creative strategies based on personal or group identity helped encourage vaccine receptiveness, especially in lower-income areas.(2) However, the identity used needed to be tailored to the region. For example, many people in Europe identify closely with sports, so having players endorse vaccination was effective. In East Asia, community members identify more closely with their professions, so tying vaccination with professional success brought better results. 

Challenge #5: Cohesion 

While pharma advertisers are growing their confidence and experience in digital advertising, it is still quite common for HCP and DTC advertising to be executed in silos. This can create a disconnect between vaccine advertising meant to reach HCPs and vaccine advertising meant to reach consumers. This disconnect increases media waste and can slow vaccination progress.

Best practice:

• Utilize integrated HCP/DTC campaigns, which leverage incidence and vaccination data to define HCP and DTC audience parameters and create campaign alignment. When both HCP and DTC efforts are optimized with trending incidence and vaccination data, the holistic performance of the campaign accelerates.

The challenges of vaccine advertising can mean less protection for those who need it most. Consider these suggestions to reduce media waste, shape creative messaging, and heighten the adoption of life-saving vaccinations. 

Want to learn more about how real-world data and optimization strengthen vaccine campaigns? Click here.