The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) seems to be taking an “if it ain’t broke” approach to its annual flu vaccine push. Rather than debuting an entirely new concept, this year’s campaign is instead a revamped version of last year’s “Wild to Mild” initiative.
“We found that it was very successful—people understood the message, [and] they were swayed by the message,” Erin Burns, associate director for communications in the CDC’s influenza division, said of last year’s inaugural “Wild to Mild” promos.
The campaign was particularly successful among its target audiences of pregnant people and parents of children, who found it “motivational” to get themselves and their kids vaccinated, Burns told Fierce Pharma Marketing in an interview.
“We wanted to take the opportunity to continue to use that message,” she said. “So, instead of developing a new campaign and spending lots of time and resources developing new assets, we decided to do a year two of Wild to Mild and used some of the savings from not developing new assets to amplify our capacity, our reach, our footprint in the market this year.”
This year’s campaign materials are similar to last year’s: They feature information about how even though one may contract the flu after getting a shot, the vaccines have been proven to mitigate the severity of the infection. Also featured are images contrasting wild animals like bears, wolves and sharks with milder versions like teddy bears, puppies and goldfish.
Like last year, this year’s campaign is “primarily digital,” Burns said, with targeted outreach on social media and programmatic display ads, plus a collaboration with the Glow pregnancy tracker app to provide information about the benefits of the flu vaccine for pregnant people.
New this year, however, is an additional out-of-home push plastering the campaign imagery throughout the interiors and exteriors of trains in four cities: Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Atlanta. Each of the train wraps are city-specific, according to Burns.
“We tried to come up with a pairing that was somehow relevant or iconic to that city,” she said, singling out the use of bear imagery in honor of Chicago’s NFL team. “That was actually one of our favorite, or preferred, pairings from last season. People really identify with the protective mama bear, especially pregnant women.”
In addition to the train wraps and digital assets placed throughout train stations in those cities, Burns said, “we’re also geo-targeting people coming in and out of those train stations. So, if you see the train … you’re also likely to have one of the ads pop up on your social media feed just because you’ve walked through that station.”
The CDC launched Wild to Mild last year with a core goal to “change the paradigm around flu vaccination,” Burns said, pointing to a widespread perception that the vaccine “doesn’t work” because people may still catch the virus despite getting the shot.
“There’s been a decline in vaccine coverage since 2019, and it’s across the board, but it is very dramatic for flu vaccine especially in pregnant women and children. And, of course, these are two groups of people who are at higher risk of being hospitalized and dying from flu complications,” she said. “So, we’re trying to get the message out there that just because you still got sick doesn’t mean that the vaccine didn’t benefit you. It could be that it saved your life.”
The renewed push, then, comes amid the ideal time to get vaccinated ahead of the full-blown respiratory illness season: “It’s getting colder, flu is going to start circulating more widely, and so the urgency that we feel is just to get as many people vaccinated as we can before flu season actually starts,” Burns said.
She also noted that the CDC’s campaign is just one complementary part of a larger push for vaccine uptake. That includes “tremendous amplification” from the “boots on the ground”—the doctors and nurses who are administering vaccines—as well as from advocacy groups and other public health departments, the latter of which includes the CDC’s parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which recently launched its own “Risk Less. Do More.” campaign promoting flu, COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus shots.
“Our campaign is focused solely on flu, but it’s part of a broader effort by a number of like-minded groups to promote the importance of vaccination as a public health intervention,” Burns said.