Disciplines:
BusinessCornelia (Connie) Pechmann (MS, MBA, PhD) is a Professor of Marketing at the UCI Paul Merage School of Business. She studies the effects of advertising, social media, product labeling, brand names and retail store locations on consumers and she has published over 100 articles, reports and papers. Professor Pechmann has received numerous grants and over $1.5M to study youths’ responses to pro- and anti-smoking ads and product placements in movies. This research persuaded movie studios to place anti-smoking ads on movie DVDs if the movies target youth and depict smoking. She is currently studying how to form effective online communities on Twitter for smoking cessation through the Tweet2Quit project funded by a $2.5M R01 grant from NIH. Professor Pechmann received the Pollay Prize for Public Interest Research and the best journal article award from the Journal of Consumer Research. She served a three-year term as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
By Connie Pechmann, UC Irvine
With the first vaccines administered in the U.S., the end of the COVID-19 pandemic is now in sight. The challenge over the next year will be achieving widespread vaccination across the entire population, especially among people of color who are suffering and dying from the virus at higher rates Many experts are worried that vaccination rates for minority groups could lag behind the rest of the population. Data from the first weeks of the vaccine rollout indicate that in some states, white Americans are being vaccinated at two to three times the rate of Black Americans.
Public health officials are exploring a variety of ways to increase vaccination rates. My research suggests that Facebook ads targeting zip codes with large minority populations, high COVID-19 rates, and low vaccine uptake could be highly effective at encouraging underrepresented groups to get vaccinated. While targeted online advertising is widely used by businesses, the public health community has been slow to adopt it. I believe that online ads, provided for free by Facebook as a public good, can be an essential tool for achieving the widespread vaccination necessary to bring the pandemic to a close…
Read the full article online at Fast Company.
This article was produced by Footnote in partnership with University of California-Irvine Paul Merage School of Business.
Get in touch about this workBy Kalinda Ukanwa of University of Southern California
Ads targeted to zip codes where vaccine uptake is low could have positive results. Facebook should give them away to public health departments.
By Andy Ryan and Roslyn Murray of Brown University
Ads targeted to zip codes where vaccine uptake is low could have positive results. Facebook should give them away to public health departments.
By Desmond Patton of the University of Pennsylvania
Ads targeted to zip codes where vaccine uptake is low could have positive results. Facebook should give them away to public health departments.
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