Television ads promoting the vaccine for Covid-19 have been airing on television since it became widely available. But a sharp decline in the TV spots appears to correlate to a persistent group of vaccine-hesitant Americans, or so suggests the reporting by CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen.
Appearing on CNN’s New Day Friday morning, Cohen cited data from iSpot that tracks commercials across the broad spectrum of broadcast and cable television. “With nearly a third of Americans opting not to get vaccinated, you would hope the ads would increase, educating people, letting people know the correct information rather than all the misinformation that’s circulating on social media,” she told Brianna Keilar.
She then unveiled a chart that showed a sharp decline in pro-vaccination television spots from the middle of May. “What they found is that the number of Covid-19 vaccine ads viewed on TV peaked in May and then went down steadily,” she noted. “That decline is really quite dramatic,” she added before noting that TV viewing naturally always goes down in the summer.
“Still, that is a decline right at the time that you don’t want a decline because there are so many people who need to hear this message,” she said, before showing the sorts of ads that resonate best with Republicans and Democrats. Turns out that a spot featuring former presidents touting the benefits of the vaccine resonated very well with Democrats but not Republicans. A FedEx advertisement that showed the nation moving forward, not backward, and getting past the pandemic was a favorite among Republicans, according to research provided to CNN from iSpot.
“Let’s take a look at the people who need to hear this message most,” Cohen concluded. “The Kaiser Family Foundation found in a recent poll said that people who say they definitely won’t get the vaccine, 15% of Democrats say they definitely won’t get it. 58% of Republicans say they definitely won’t get it. So, there need to be ads obviously that really are geared towards Republicans since 58% of them say they definitely won’t get a vaccine.”
Nearly 70% of Americans have had at least one shot, though the new delta variant has not only spiked infection rates in states with largely unvaccinated populations, it has also led to an urgent call for more to get inoculated.
Watch above via CNN.
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