Use of Messaging Principles to Design a Facebook Ad Promoting Public Engagement in Serious Illness Care for National...

Public hesitation to engage in advance care planning, consultation with palliative care, and admission to hospice is a significant barrier to improving patient outcomes. In previous study, we derived five empirically supported messaging principles, and in this project we used these messaging principles to design, place, and analyze a 60-second video for the Oregon Coalition for Living Well with Serious Illness. The video was scripted to emphasize a single message that had emerged from the empirical research: that "you should have a say in your care." We deliberately did not use the term "advance care planning" because our prior focus groups showed that most consumers did not use this term. The marketing plan for the resulting video on Facebook included a paid sponsorship of the full-length video through a Facebook boosted post, and three 10-second ads featuring key lines from the video that tested different elaborations of the central message. Facebook Analytics indicated that the 60-second video was viewed 67,650 times in the week it was promoted. The three 10-second ads, which showed selected moments from the full-length video, were viewed a total of 253,087 times. Of the three 10-second ads, the one emphasizing "What matters to me is being near my family" (65% of clicks) strongly outperformed "I don't want to go out on a machine" and "I've heard so many medical horror stories" (35% for both messages combined) as messages that persuaded viewers to click through the ad to the website. Use of the messaging principles to guide the design and marketing of this Facebook ad shows that (1) the public is interested in serious illness care, (2) that targeted social media can be used to reach a defined public audience, and that (3) this public messaging strategy can be implemented at relatively low cost.