Abstract
AbstractChanging human behavior is essential for biodiversity conservation, but robust approaches for large scale change are needed. Concepts like repeat message exposure and social reinforcement, as well as mechanisms like online news coverage and targeted advertisements, are currently used by private and public sectors, and could prove powerful for conservation. Thus, to explore their potential in influencing wildlife consumption, we used online advertisements through Facebook, Google, and Outbrain, to promote news articles discussing the use of a Critically Endangered antelope (the Saiga tatarica) as a traditional Chinese medicine in Singapore. Our message, tailored to middle‐aged Chinese Singaporean women, framed saiga horn products as being no longer socially endorsed. Through advert performance and in‐depth analyses of Facebook user engagement, we assessed audience response. Our message pervaded Singapore's online media (e.g., our adverts were shown almost five million times; and the story ran on seven news outlets), and resulted in widespread desirable audience responses (e.g., 63% of Facebook users' engagements included identifiably positive features like calls for public action to reduce saiga horn consumption, anger at having unknowingly used a Critically Endangered species, and self‐pledges to no longer use it; only 13% of engagements included identifiably negative features). This work shows that targeted dissemination of online news articles can have promising results, and may have wide applicability to conservation.
Highlights
The global expansion of the internet has rapidly made it an integral part of communication at personal and societal levels
This study found that the largest consumer group was aged 35–59 years, and women of this age were the most likely to purchase saiga horn for both themselves and others
This article's story was picked up by other open-access online news outlets, which we identified via daily online searches and included in our advertising as additional seed sources
Summary
The global expansion of the internet has rapidly made it an integral part of communication at personal and societal levels. Behavior (Clarke, Kuosmanen, & Barry, 2015; Kubacki, Rundle-Thiele, Schuster, Wessels, & Gruneklee, 2015), few have been strategically employed to promote behavior change for biodiversity conservation. Paid advertising is offered on most platforms like social media, search engines, and websites; and the platforms' ability to identify and present relevant advertising to consumers on the basis of demographic and behavioral factors (Berghel, 2018) could be used to identify groups likely to perform undesirable conservation behaviors, and directly target messages . The effect of news coverage on political opinion and voting behavior is well studied (Reeves, McKee, & Stuckler, 2016), and has been shown to affect awareness and behavior in health and climate change (Weeks, Friedenberg, Southwell, & Slater, 2012; Maxwell Boykoff, McNatt, & Goodman, 2015)
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