Breaking Through the Saturated Media Environment
Breaking Through the Saturated Media Environment
Making COVID-19 vaccination a social norm for young people in Brazil
“Young people in Brazil underestimated COVID-19 and weren’t very responsive to official communications. Two years into the pandemic they had already been exposed to a lot of COVID-19 messaging and weren’t really paying attention anymore. We needed innovative ways to get them to engage with our messaging. This is why we created a campaign with the dating app, Tinder. Tinder was popular among young people and hadn’t been saturated with COVID content. Our message focused on dating safely: a safe date is with someone that was also vaccinated. Working with Tinder was a great opportunity to talk to young people about getting vaccinated and help establish vaccination as a normal thing to do.” – Junior Moreira, Campaigner with Verified
It’s the Tram of the Vaccinated [Portuguese Slang]
In today’s media landscape, people are bombarded with information from a variety of sources. To break through the noise and get your audience to pay attention, make sure your topic is important to them and that you understand what they already think about it. The best way to do this is to listen to them, whether through focus groups, surveys, social listening tools, market research or academic literature.
You also want to make sure your content is fresh and relevant. When people hear the same information over and over again they start to tune out. Make sure you know what messages your audience is already hearing and package them in new ways.
In Brazil, the pandemic closed bars, clubs and other common spaces where young people gather, socialize and flirt. This made the dating app Tinder an even more common way to set up dates. To take advantage of this, and reach young people in a way that was relevant to them, we partnered with Tinder to promote the COVID-19 vaccine.
Our campaign attempted to shift our audience’s social norms—how they think their peers feel or act—by engaging with an issue that was important to them: dating safely. Our call to action was unique to Tinder: we asked users to go to the Tinder Vaccination Center, where they could get information about the vaccine, and, once they were vaccinated, add a sticker to their profile letting everyone know. We wanted young people in Brazil to see that their peers were getting vaccinated and that it was a normal thing to do.
The Tinder campaign was a huge success, with higher click-through rates than is typical of other Tinder campaigns. The unique nature of the campaign also led to media coverage, including 10 articles, a podcast, and a 3-minute feature story on the educational online channel TVT. This coverage expanded the reach of the campaign beyond the target audience on Tinder, ensuring more people got the message.
If you want to find out more about breaking through the saturated media environment, download the PDF below.
