Hit me with your best shot: Public relations and the campaign for Covid-19 vaccines

 ew758821@ohio.edu

Elisabeth Warner

    In an irony lost on no one, public relations as a professional practice has terrible PR. Often associated with campaigns that spin slivers of truth into narratives of fool's gold, PR has come to mean corporate or political manipulation with an eye toward lining someone's pocket or maintaining power of a particular realm.

    PR cliches abound: the vapid PR flack, inauthentic and fantastical portrayals of harmful products, people, or institutions, and athletic maneuvering to protect those with privilege against the consequences of their own actions. Fairly or not, PR is not typically spoken of in the same breath with ethical and principled occupations.

Image: The Atlantic

The more you know

    But for all the ire PR as a profession receives, the long history of public service campaigns, a marketing endeavor that combines advertising and PR, is almost universally regarded as a positive contribution to society. 

    Iconic promotions include recruitment drives for working women during World War II, Smokey the Bear's forest fire prevention campaign, awareness for organizations like the Red Cross, Peace Corps, and the United Negro College Fund (though the famous "Crying Indian" ad, in addition to being racist, intended to promote environmental awareness, and instead turned out to be full of ethical issues).

Image: Ad Council

    But even when promoting behaviors that are intended to protect the public, many of the ethical concerns that exist in conventional PR or advertising* are present in public service campaigns, as well. In any campaign, time is on no one's side, whether the work is in support of a household product or a significant public safety measure. The temptation to get sloppy with the quality of work that results from the pressures around urgency– real or imagined– is evergreen. But the very real stakes of a public service campaign has the potential to amplify that temptation.

    Public service campaigns are no less vulnerable to the use of emotional manipulation, excessive fear, or an over-reliance on harmful stereotypes to advance their messaging than their commercial counterparts, either. They may even be more susceptible because the perceived greater good could justify some blurring of ethical guidelines so strictly employed in commercial PR work. 

    And because so much of any campaign depends of the deployment of agents of influence, the campaign architects may prioritize the potential impact of the influencer over their lack of experience or history of problematic actions or statements, either of which could create injury to the public.

Image: Tenor

No shortage of ethical challenges

    The US public service campaigns designed to encourage and advance vaccinations against Covid-19 have provided an opportunity to witness many of these ethical challenges in real time. The PR campaigns, notably those created by the Ad Council, the dominant organization producing and disseminating public service campaigns (and the same organization who produced those previously mentioned iconic PSAs), and the US government, have a famously difficult objective– to combat the unique vaccine hesitancies represented in disparate populations. 

    Any public service announcement faces an ethical obligation to reach as many potentially impacted people as possible. In the case of Covid, that meant the entire country, necessitating complex, resource-heavy strategies. This forces the campaign to weigh the benefits of delaying the launch until each of the campaign's components can be simultaneously coordinated, which meant a longer absence of life-saving messaging, against those of dropping each component as it's completed to reach some targets more quickly, which could advantage those groups unfairly and even put the general population at greater risk.

Image: Strategic Agility Institute

Content Counts

    The content of the Covid vaccine campaign also has ethical implications. In addition to the challenges of knowing when and how to launch, Americans are consuming Covid and vaccine content from a surfeit of sources, making it necessary to curate specific messaging campaigns for a wide variety of population groups. To maximize the efficacy of the messaging impact, some campaign developers may be tempted to loosen ethical prescriptions against using gender, racial, or religious stereotypes for more visceral and immediate reactions. 

    In some cases, developers may choose vaccine messaging that is entwined with behaviors that are harmful in some other arena of public health to connect with hard-to-reach populations. Messaging that reinforces objectification of women, for instance,  celebrates gun use in young men, or shows one population to be superior to another my lead to higher vaccination rates for that targeted group, but would signal that behaviors known to lead to negative social outcomes are culturally acceptable.

 Image: Twitter

The Influencers

    The use of influencers in public service campaigns is a powerful tool that expands messaging reach, and the success of any campaign often rests on pairing the right influencer with the right target population. Again, as in commercial campaigns, the value of the cultural figure who will resonate with the intended audience is critical, but that may mean the social currency of that figure is more relevant than their lack of expertise, minimizing the value of true experts. 

    Does anyone believe the members of BTS to be more knowledgeable about vaccines than the average epidemiologists? Probably not, but reinforcing the value of celebrity over expertise has consequences to our society. Sometimes an influencer may be highly valued by one group but disdained by another the campaign is trying to reach. PR professionals need to balance competing ethical concerns to determine which course of action will protect the most people, both in the immediate moment and in the future.

Image: Washington Post

Individualist v collectivist themes in Covid public service campaigns    

Finally, the slogans used in the two primary Covid vaccine campaigns present additional ethical considerations.

    In the campaign conceived by the Ad Council, their slogan was, "It's up to you". This had the benefit of testing well, as it aligned with those whose  primary objection to the vaccine was a belief that it was a government intrusion. "It's up to you" gives individuals a sense of agency, which helped many, especially those in conservative groups, feel more positively toward the message.

    At the same time, "It's up to you" underplays their seriousness of Covid by making it appear that vaccines were optional and creating an impression that optional vaccines would somehow lead to a Covid-free future. If Covid were that much of a threat, some might think, the government would mandate vaccines, just as they do seatbelts and drivers liveness. The Ad Council's tagline also lets the government off the hook by communicating that the responsibility to eradicate Covid was the public's, not the government's. This has the added effect of implying the government is too weak to get people to vaccinate through their own possible regulations and incentives.

    Conversely, the slogan used by the US government, "We can do this", sends a message of collectivism and unity. Many would argue that this approach is both necessary and ideal, considering the nature of the issue– a virus that is exponentially replicating in hosts who are not immune. The conventional wisdom is that Covid can't be eradicated if it can live in its hosts at full strength, so anything less than a full-throated endorsement of a collectivist strategy would risk lives.

    But, of course, the United States is as divided as it has been in anyone's living memory, making the earnestness of the government's roll up our sleeves attitude seem embarrassingly out of touch, and easy to dismiss by those who have never felt less connected to their neighbors. 

Image: Imgflp

Different dilemma, same ask

    In each of the ethical dilemmas outlined here, some type of compromise is needed to determine what path will serve the greatest number of people with the lowest cost, and that answer will shift depending on the many variables that require thoughtful consideration.

    The work of PR professionals, despite the industry's poor reputation, is essential not just to their powerful clients but to the messaging that comes from public service campaigns that have the power to shape cultural discourse and public health. This supercharges their responsibility to painstakingly explore the ethical questions that present in every communication, and to weigh the potential cost and benefit for each scenario they pursue with an eye to what is in the best interest of the public.

*PR and advertising are separate occupations but are both under the larger marketing umbrella and naturally have many shared goals and tactics. There is an overlap between the two in public service campaigns, where advertising is one components. Ads are joined with PR efforts to craft the rhetoric supporting a given issue and partner with various media platforms, as well as cultural- and issue- specific influencers, to promote that issue.