Facebook ads with physician-delivered videos were shown before the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and focused on staying safe during the COVID pandemic by limiting travel and mask-wearing.
The investigators used Facebook ads to show a 20 second video clip recorded by Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard and Lynn Community health center doctors (6 people in all) to approximately 20,000,000 Facebook users. The ads will be shown before the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday and will focus on staying safe - limiting travel and mask-wearing. The investigators will randomize exposure to the ad campaign at the ZIP code or county level to ask: Do the videos change mobility and Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday travel? Do they reduce the spread of COVID-19? Are there spillover impacts from the video messages? For example, if individuals decide to stay home, then do the geographical regions that tend to be visited by people from treated areas experience any effects, either through information spillovers or through a reduction in travel?
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
PREVENTION
Masking
NONE
Enrollment
820
Facebook ads to show a 15 second video clip recorded by MGH, Harvard and Lynn Community health center and other health care professionals. The ads will be shown before the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday and will focus on staying safe - limiting travel and mask-wearing. The investigators will randomize exposure to the ad campaign at the ZIP code or county level.
JPAL North America
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Facebook Movement Metric
The change in movement metric is the percent change in distance covered in a day compared to the same day of the week in the benchmark period of February 2-29, 2020, by people who started the day in a particular location. We define holiday travel as travel during the three days preceding each holiday, since the available data does not allow us to compute the impact of the intervention on the return travel (after the holiday). The reason is that the mobility data describes the behavior throughout the day, for people who were in each county that morning. Since the campaign was targeted based on home location, we can only capture its impact on travel away from home, not back home.
Time frame: November 26, 2020 (Thanksgiving); December 24-25, 2020 (Christmas); February 2-29, 2020 (Baseline benchmark)
Percentage Leaving Home on Day of Holiday
The Facebook stay put metric is the percentage of people who stay within a small geographical area (a "tile" of 600m\*600m in which they started the day). We use it to compute the share of people leaving home on the day of the holiday (i.e. this variable = 1 - stay put on the day of the holiday).
Time frame: November 26, 2020 (Thanksgiving); December 24-25, 2020 (Christmas)
Inverse Hyperbolic Sine of COVID-19 Cases
Inverse hyperbolic sine of COVID-19 cases during a 14 day period starting 5 days after each holiday
Time frame: December 1-14 (Thanksgiving arms) and January 1-14 (Christmas arms)
Knowledge of COVID-19 Prevention Message (Recall of ad, Intent to Travel, Mask Wearing and Beliefs About Travel)
Facebook will ask a set of users in treated zip codes to answer four survey questions (each user answers only one question each). A small within-zip control group will be held from being treated, enabling comparisons between those who see the videos and those who don't. These questions will be asked a few days after the ad is shown on the User's feed and will include 1) recall of the ad; 2) intention of traveling over holiday; 3) intention of wearing a mask; and 4) beliefs about whether people should travel over holiday.
This platform is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional.
Time frame: up to one month
Average Number of Tiles People Occupy (Mobility Measure)
this measures each day "how much people move around by counting the number of level-16 Bing tiles they are seen in within a day. People seen in more tiles are probably moving around more, while people seen in fewer are probably moving around less. Each day take eligible people in a given region and compute the number of distinct tiles they were seen in." This is aggregated to the county level.
Time frame: up to one month
Percentage of Eligible Participants Only Observed in a Single Level-16 Bing Tile (no Change in Movement)
Facebook "Stay-put" data: this measures each day "the percentage of eligible people who are only observed in a single level-16 Bing tile (600m x 600m) during the course of a day" aggregated to they county level.
Time frame: up to one month