Down & Dirty - Using Social and Interest-Based Targeted Ads for Teen Tobacco Prevention

Background:

Mainstream public health campaigns struggle to capture the attention of rural teens, often facing issues with trust, relatability, and effectiveness. This session will discuss effective ways to reach this audience while showing how the campaign “Down And Dirty” (D&D) shifts rural social norms through authentic social and digital media.D&D uses a Social Branding strategy focusing on understanding unique values and interests of teen subgroups, rather than advertising to all teens at once. Social Branding associates healthy behaviors with audience values and lifestyles.

Program background:

Focus groups were conducted with over 300 teens across rural and suburban locations in six states to understand cultural affiliations and social characteristics of tobacco users. Findings indicated teens identifying with the Country culture were at significantly greater risk for chewing tobacco and strongly valued freedom and family. While living in rural areas typically increased risk of chew tobacco use, identification with Country culture better predicted increased risk and helped define their identity.

By culturally segmenting Country teens, key factors about personal values and identity that motivate their behaviors including tobacco use were discovered. For example, research showed Country teens do not pay attention to anti-industry messages because of their value in personal responsibility. Going against the norms of mainstream teen health campaigns, D&D ads focus on family values and freedom to resonate specifically with Country teens. These insights were crucial to creative media development. To effectively position tobacco use as a behavior that conflicts with Country lifestyle, content should highlight Country values and embody a Country tone of voice. A social and digital media activation strategy was developed that centered around family. The content communicated that in order to protect younger siblings, teens should live tobacco-free. By aligning D&D behavior change objectives with media performance measures, a variety of channels (Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube) were implemented.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

32% of teens who completed the online experience clicked to the website from a paid ad, which is much higher than the industry average of 3-5%. Additionally, the YouTube ad received a high 99.4% video completion rate, industry benchmark is 75%. This performance not only shows leveraging media channels for their strengths can lead to increased engagement, but also at-risk youth can be reached more effectively with value-driven content.

D&D’s evaluation uses a cross-sectional survey that recruits using Interest-based targeted ads on Facebook to minimize waste of outreach efforts. The same keywords that are used by D&D social media advertising are leveraged to recruit a sample that has likely been exposed to campaign messages. For example, some of these keywords include deer hunting, Carhartt, and mudding.

Conclusions:

The survey collects Country culture affiliation, tobacco attitudes and behavior and campaign engagement & appeal.

Implications for research and/or practice:

In a recently published 3-year evaluation, D&D was associated with both attitude change and chew reduction among Country teens in Virginia who engaged with the campaign (Wagner, Fernandez, Jordan, and Saggese, 2018). This demonstrates D&D as a promising intervention for reducing tobacco use among Country teens.