The Effectiveness of Online Messages for Promoting Smoking Cessation Resources: Predicting Nationwide Campaign Effects From Neural Responses in the EX Campaign.

Ralf Schmälzle,Jennifer Cantrell,Jean M Vettel,Nicole Cooper,Sangil Lee,Steven Tompson,Emily B Falk,Matthew Brook O'Donnell

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2020.565772

Abstract

What are the key ingredients that make some persuasive messages resonate with audiences and elicit action, while others fail? Billions of dollars per year are put towards changing human behavior, but it is difficult to know which messages will be the most persuasive in the field. By combining novel neuroimaging techniques and large-scale online data, we examine the role of key health communication variables relevant to motivating action at scale. We exposed a sample of smokers to anti-smoking web-banner messages from a real-world campaign while measuring message-evoked brain response patterns via fMRI, and we also obtained subjective evaluations of each banner. Neural indices were derived based on: (i) message-evoked activity in specific brain regions; and (ii) spatially distributed response patterns, both selected based on prior research and theoretical considerations. Next, we connected the neural and subjective data with an independent, objective outcome of message success, which is the per-banner click-through rate in the real-world campaign. Results show that messages evoking brain responses more similar to signatures of negative emotion and vividness had lower online click-through-rates. This strategy helps to connect and integrate the rapidly growing body of knowledge about brain function with formative research and outcome evaluation of health campaigns, and could ultimately further disease prevention efforts.

Highlights

Mass media health campaigns are a key component of public health promotion (Wakefield et al, 2010), and the internet has become one of the most prominent channels for dissemination of health campaign messages (Shi et al, 2018)
We find that multivariate brain signatures of negative emotion and vividness in response to anti-smoking messages in this context were negatively associated with the real-world success of the messages, i.e., the click-through rates generated by individual banner messages
Integrating functional neuroimaging with large-scale outcome data about campaign effects is a promising avenue for future work that can improve public communication campaigns as well as other forms of information dissemination

Summary

Introduction

Mass media health campaigns are a key component of public health promotion (Wakefield et al, 2010), and the internet has become one of the most prominent channels for dissemination of health campaign messages (Shi et al, 2018). The most widely used approach to capture message-evoked brain responses has relied on assessing the average signal in specific brain regions (Falk and Scholz, 2018). These approaches have primarily focused on the role of regions broadly implicated in positive valuation and personal relevance, such as the nucleus accumbens (NAcc; Knutson et al, 2014; Genevsky and Knutson, 2015; Genevsky et al, 2017; Scholz et al, 2017) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC; Falk et al, 2012; Venkatraman et al, 2015; Scholz et al, 2017, 2019; Doré et al, 2019a)

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Discussion

Conclusion