• by Les Luchter , October 16, 2024

Yes, Las Vegas has a train system.

And those riding Sin City’s Monorail these days are likely to see those trains wrapped inside and out with flu vaccine ads from the Centers for Disease Control.

“A flu vaccine can take flu from wild to mild,” read the ads, with a cougar representing “wild” and a kitten “mild.”

Digital ads in the train stations and geotargeted social media feeds to people going in and out of the stations reinforce the message that “when you get vaccinated, you may still get sick, but it will make your illness less severe,” Erin Burns, associate director for communications at the CDC’s influenza division, tells Marketing Daily.

Similar scenarios are playing out on and around the trains in three other cities, with animal pairings localized to each setting. In Chicago, it’s a grizzly bear and a teddy bear, in Atlanta a coyote and a puppy, and in San Francisco, a shark and a goldfish.

It’s all part of the CDC’s second annual “Wild to Mild”-themed installment of its decades-long flu vaccination campaign.

Other new aspects of the Weber Shandwick campaign include a partnership with pregnancy tracking app Glow, part of the CDC’s specific targeting of flu shots to pregnant women.

“Since the pandemic, coverage of the flu vaccine for pregnant women has dropped double digits from 57% in 2019-2020 to 38% last season,"” says Burns. “These are high-risk people who are more likely to be hospitalized and have complications of their pregnancy because of flu. So we’re trying to reverse some of those declines.”

Additional partners in the flu vaccination campaign include healthcare providers from “big hospital systems in major markets all the way down to sort of small mom-and-pop kind of clinics,” Burns notes.

For use on social media and elsewhere, CDC provides the HCPs with both branded and unbranded assets, the latter because “we’ve realized sometimes a message about vaccination might be more effective if does not carry the CDC logo.”

The CDC is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is running its own “Risk Less. Do More” campaign that advocates for COVID and RSV vaccines in addition to flu vaccines.

Burns calls the CDC campaign complementary to the HHS campaign in that both aim to “raise education” and “enhance public trust” in vaccinations, but also different in “expanding the message specifically to flu vaccine.”

CDC does not have its own campaigns for either COVID or RSV vaccines.

“With flu, we have the benefit of having been around for more than 50 years. We have an established campaign and an established budget process,” Burns explains. “For some of these newer vaccines, although they are getting resources, that sort of system isn’t set up yet within CDC.”

While “Wild to Mild” will run into January, Burns stresses that October “is the time” to get vaccinated. This year’s shot, she says, “protects against three different viruses. Please go out and get your flu shot. It can be life-saving.”