As a strategist for BBH Health, I spend most of my workday immersed in scientific data and health communications tactics. I parse over competitor messages, comb through audience segmentation data, and derive meaning out of p-values. The stuff I work on makes its way to doctors’ hearts and minds via medical journals, conferences, and clinics. 

Which made it a bit surprising when I found at a public toilet cubicle in Regent’s Park (of all places) a piece of health communications created with admirable strategic precision. Objectively, it has all the hallmarks of good communication practices — it’s succinct, it’s emotionally triggering, it uses straightforward language, it says just enough to let your mind fill in the rest of the blanks.

It’s also utter garbage. It’s full of anti-vax bullshit. 

My immediate instinct was to peel it off and bin it. But I also couldn’t help but dissect the messages before I crumpled it up. After all, my job is to understand how we can get better at communicating health-related and scientific information. And I can't get good at it without understanding the opposite camp. There’s a reason why vaccination rates have plateaued in many countries; there’s a reason why Dr Fauci gets death threats; there’s a reason why the Chief Medical Officer for England and Niki Minaj now belong to the same sentence after the rapper tweeted out false information.

Let’s face it, much to my chagrin (and to the detriment of our society), these false messages work. And you can’t outrun them without first figuring out how they work. 

As I said, I found this particular set of messages stuck to a public toilet cubicle. It doesn’t matter that I’m not the ideal target audience. (For the record, I have a degree in immunology. I fucking love vaccines!) For those few seconds, I'm a captive audience with nowhere else to look. 

Lesson 1: Meet people where they are. Don’t create unnecessary barriers and bottlenecks when you try to communicate to the masses. Catch people at where they hang out most often. Even when people don’t intentionally seek out information, information finds the way to them as they’re doom-scrolling through their newsfeed or have the next YouTube video auto-queued. Why should we stand back and let bad actors own these spaces? 

Finding this insidious piece of communication in a public bathroom is perhaps no coincidence. Now that I know what to look for, I see similar pieces stuck to lampposts, bins and bus shelters. There are probably practical reasons for this — no sane, educated editors or producers would want to give this any airtime. But these types of guerilla tactics paradoxically work in their favour because of selection bias. If anything, the fact that they’re lurking in the shadows and circumventing more traditional channels makes them extra appealing to a subset of the population who are already skeptical of institutions and government regulations.

Lesson 2: Understand your audience and know how to leverage their existing behaviours. There’s a reason why us strategists obsess over how our target audiences think, feel, and do. Without those insights and subsequent channel selection, any message will inevitably fall on deaf ears.

As I mentioned before, the writing of this is concise and conversational. Annoyingly, the five bullet points on the sticker have just enough hints of truth in it that you can’t dismiss it outright. To those fluent in scientific lingo, these sort of half-truths are blatant and easily dismissable. To casual members of the public buzzing from a round of prosecco under the hot sun, it might be enough to plant the seed of doubt. And to the gullible vaccine-skeptics, the efforts to shatter these half-truths will require explaining concepts such as probability, viral load and asymptomatic transmission. Simple wording has the first-mover advantage of imprinting onto people’s minds, and it becomes an uphill battle to reverse these damages.

Lesson 3: Keep your messages simple and digestible. In scientific communications, we tend to over-complicate things and string together too many four-syllable words. We’re often guilty of trying to write for the smartest person in the room. When in fact, in order for most people to understand what you’re trying to say, you need to do the exact opposite.

One thing anti-vaxxers are really good at is fear-mongering. Now, I’m not suggesting that we should straight-up copy their playbook. Fear-mongering is entirely inappropriate when you try to describe a cancer drug. But their intentional choice of provocative and emotionally vivid language is instrumental in helping them reach their communication objective. A “mask” is a benign piece of fabric that you can easily take on and off; a “muzzle” implies something more domineering and restrictive. ”Study participant” is one of the hundreds of thousands of people who volunteer to enroll in double-blinded trials; a “lab rat” has no agency and is hapless against the whims of evil scientists.

Lesson 4: Use emotive language and images. It’s bleeding obvious, right?! But actually, a lot of health communications intentionally use neutral language, since the people behind them perceive that as more credible and factual. Guess what – a textbook is credible and factual, but very few people would call that engaging or captivating. (Again, this coming from a nerd who studied immunology.) Humans are emotional beings, regardless of socioeconomic strata, cultural backgrounds, and age. Let’s lean into it!

As you can see, none of these are earth-shattering revelations. Many brands and marketers have been practicing these simple principles in their comms. Those in the healthcare industry are surprisingly lagging behind on this and it’s about time we extrapolate these best practices to improve our rapport with the general public. Surely we can do our jobs better than a ragtag group of anti-vaxxers armed with low-fi stickers!

So, if there’s one new thing you managed to learn from this article, it’s this — if your balls start swelling, immediately seek proper medical help and maybe check for STIs first.