Put the face to the vaccine

The vaccines are coming. More precisely, Covid-19 vaccinations are already being administered in large parts of the world at varying speeds, while it will be March before the Australian Federal Government have their needles at the ready.

The exercise is a mammoth communications exercise, which is made harder by the determined levels of suspicion levelled at the idea of vaccinating. Way before Covid-19 became the viral poster child, the World Health Organisation listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the biggest threats to global health. The Covid conspiracy chorus, fed by a ragbag of intransigent celebrities has done nothing to soothe the situation. To that end, a recent survey by the Associated Press found that a quarter of US adults “weren’t sure” if they wanted to be vaccinated against Covid. Granted, the picture in Australia is far less recalcitrant, but the reality is there are people who have misgivings about vaccinating, whether that is borne of fear or ideology, which brings me to my argument.

It’s the people, stupid, or in campaign terms, it you want ‘em to vaccinate, tell ‘em about the people who made it. Scientific and medical breakthroughs have always been about the people, whether it’s Fleming and penicillin; Christiaan Barnard and his hearts, or Crick and Watson and DNA. As an audience, we can relate to these individual stories and so they become memorable. Their efforts talk to attributes which the rest of us crave – tenacity, wisdom, and inventiveness. We go as far as holding them up to our children as emblems of hard work and possibility – “look, what you can achieve if you try hard enough!”.

For communicators, their magic, quite simply, is they have a face. We can subsequently, personalise campaigns and with personalisation, comes greater trust. We can see the whites of their eyes and they look like you and me. Audiences tend to find it harder to distrust individuals, versus the organisations they work for.

Astra Zeneca, Pfizer, Moderna and BioNTech are superbly effective businesses, who all do important work; in fact, they do very important work – their products can keep us alive - but the ‘body corporate ‘is deemed far less trustworthy than the individual men and women who run them. Case in point, Edelman’s widely reported Trust Barometer found that 50% of respondents in Australia questioned if “capitalism did more harm than good”. It is easier for audience members to feel empowered enough to condemn big (read profitable), faceless organisations; especially with names that would suggest they come from other planets. The fact that the vaccine breakthrough was engineered and managed by these institutions (together with Oxford University) is not contested but framing the story in corporate terms loses sight of those individual exertions and emotions we can all relate to at times of such challenges. And as any discerning communicator knows, if our audience can connect with our campaigns, their levels of engagement will be far more meaningful. Pharmaceuticals work furiously at an image of control and dispassionate efficiency, but in undermining any resistance to the vaccine, it’s a must that they get behind the polished livery and show us the blood, sweat and tears.

Is Storytelling in PR worthless?

Naturally, there will be exceptions to the rule, but on the whole, the industry is not equipped to produce compelling stories. I recognise that’s a bold, if not heretical, claim which is in need of some supporting arguments, so here goes.

PR professionals, as with the rest of the communications community, have been slavish to the idea of story, but we haven’t been astute enough to recognise that we tend to do it wrongly. Here’s what I mean, as practitioners we rely on conventional rhetoric to persuade. We mirror our clients, who have been trained this way; as creative writing guru, Robert McKee says, we build our case on facts, stats and quotes from authorities. We see it as an intellectual process, because we can’t see it any other way. Subsequently, we miss the vital component that make stories persuasive – the emotion!

Which begs the question – why do we miss it? As I said, this is partly down to producing what we think the clients want – a safe, logic-driven, data-based approach that typically leaves audiences cold at best. Ultimately though, we can’t do this properly, because as practitioners we’re schooled to keep those emotions in check.  This is especially the case with agency staff – I include myself here as a former agency man – who are immediately alerted of the paramount need to keep clients happy. I’m not saying that agency folk lack maturity per se; of course not, there are some brilliant minds at work here, but I fear they reflect their environmental upbringing which is essentially about one thing – profit. If we don’t fully explore our feelings in this space, including the reality of failure and the uncertainties of a tech future, how can we expect to produce rich, meaningful narratives for others?

Disruption is affecting us all at dizzying speeds, businesses are feeling increasingly vulnerable, so it is incumbent on us as professionals to embrace greater emotional exposure – to demonstrate how we feel - to produce stories and relationships that are reflective of our growing sensitivities and befitting of a more engaged audience.

This article first featured in Mumbrella on the 19 December