The Western Australian Department of the Premier and Cabinet and Department of Health has launched a new public awareness campaign to combat vaccine misinformation. The campaign, titled 'Don’t Assume You’re Immune', was created by 303 MullenLowe, Mediahub, and Carat WA.

The initiative aims to educate the public about the importance of vaccines, encourage people to get vaccinated according to the WA immunisation schedule, and raise awareness of the potentially life-threatening complications of vaccine-preventable diseases.

303 MullenLowe developed the campaign to drive medium and long-term behaviour change around immunisation, through strategy, creative, and production. Mediahub was tasked with media strategy, collaborating with Carat WA, which developed the channel implementation plan for the integrated campaign.

The campaign will run for the next 12 months across TV, online video, social media, large and small format OOH, radio (targeted and mainstream), press, cinema, high impact digital displays, and search.

"The subject of vaccinations is clouded by misinformation and disinformation, so it makes behaviour change challenging. One of the biggest barriers to vaccine take-up is a sense of complacency – essentially, ‘it’ll never happen to me’, so demonstrating that complacency has very real consequences was an important element to address," said Matt Oakley, Chief Strategy Officer at 303 MullenLowe Perth.

The campaign's message was developed with a strong sense of compassion rather than compliance, the agencies said, addressing complacency, low perceived risk of disease, and misconceptions around possible side effects as the biggest barriers to vaccine uptake.

"The campaign's tagline, 'Don’t Assume You’re Immune', is intended to be a memorable mnemonic and a call to action to increase the perceived risk to the health of individuals and their loved ones," said Oakley.

A key role in delivering campaign effectiveness was to ensure all media aligned with the identified stages of behaviour change, Kylie Macey, GM at Mediahub Perth, continued.

"Having the right mix of channels meant that we could firstly capture the general population’s attention and subsequently raise their motivation. Secondly, we needed to fill knowledge gaps by giving answers and capability to key segments. And finally, we needed to demonstrate the opportunity to take action with disease specific creative," she said

Michelle Testa, Client Partner at Carat WA, said the campaign is grounded in fusing behaviour change principles with metrics of attention to "jolt the community into action".

"Whilst a robust digital strategy shifts that attention to building trust and action through pairing data signals to match content and audience. This campaign demonstrates the power of collaboration for the public good and Carat WA is pleased it could play a part in such an important community initiative," she said.