Abstract
This paper discusses findings from a commissioned evaluation of an Australian government COVID-19 health campaign that utilised third-party influencers to increase the reach of health communication messages among culturally and linguistically diverse young people. Although the campaign was successful, interviews with select influencers and target audience members indicated that the ‘serious’ tone of the health messaging was less effective and less likely to be shared and that messages should be more ‘entertaining’. Analyses of data indicated three themes providing insights into how future campaigns may benefit from a focus that draws together health information and entertainment using models already constructed in the entertainment–education field: (1) Entertaining health messages have a stronger fit with influencers who are known for their entertainment value; (2) Entertaining messages are more memorable and more likely to be shared; (3) A balance between entertainment and the signifiers of trust and credibility such as government health authority logos overcomes trust issues in the context of current health disinformation and misinformation.
Keywords
Introduction
The affordances of digital communication and the cultural practices of interactivity, virality and influencer micro-celebrity have had an impact over the past decade on how health communication messages are cultivated, targeted and tailored (Salaschek and Bonfadelli, 2020). At the same time, sociopolitical issues of health disinformation (Cover et al., 2022), disparities in community trust in authorised health messages (Wild et al., 2021) and the onset of COVID-19 as one of the most impactful pandemics in over a century have further complexified the strategy and practice of health communication, enhancing the need for urgent, targeted, trustworthy and appealing messages. This has been particularly necessary to encourage COVID-19 compliance among harder-to-reach communities to ensure vital safety measures such as social distancing, stay-at-home and curfew orders, mask-wearing, symptom recognition, testing and vaccination (Young and Bleakley, 2020; Barr and Cashill, 2022). Social media and the deployment of third-party influencers and micro-celebrities have been taken up in many jurisdictions to help address existing shortfalls in health communication networks, including particularly appeals to communities and young people perceived in early data to be at higher risk (Gogoi et al., 2021; Finlay and Wenitong, 2020; Perrins et al., 2021; Cheng et al., 2021).
Social media influencers are increasingly a key factor in health communication and significant actors in the discourses of health and well-being in the digital ecology. Influencers have proven valuable contributors alongside professional content developers in advertising and messaging (Nguyen et al., 2020; Schouten et al., 2020), including health and well-being messages (Sovereign and Walker, 2020). Influencers have thus begun to play a potentially valuable role in circulating targeted health messages and shaping online conversations relevant to target communities’ response to, and uptake of, pandemic health strategies (Lutkenhaus et al., 2019). However, one aspect of the value of social media influencers’ involvement in contemporary content production is their demonstrated capacity to re-package serious topics – such as politics, social issues and scientific theory – in ways that are entertaining and therefore more appealing to their target audiences and fanbases (Abidin, 2018: 26). Given the intersection between message-tailoring, community or follower-targeting, entertainment value and practices of re-packaging, it is valuable in the context of pandemic-related health communication to better understand the role of entertainment in health messages that are communicated by third-party influencers on behalf of recognised health authorities and government bodies. This helps inform future pandemic-related health communication by making sense of the creative practices and audience reception preferences for entertainment in the contexts of influencer brand consistency, entertainment's virality, and the intersection between entertaining content and health information credibility. The latter, in particular, emerges as a key area of concern whereby both health authorities and everyday influencers must navigate a complex terrain of appealing content creation while retaining authenticity and credibility in an era marked by disinformation.
To address this need, this paper focuses on the role of entertainment in influencer health messaging. It draws on interviews with stakeholders, influencers and audience members that were undertaken by the authors as part of a formal evaluation of an Australian state government campaign that used third-party influencers (content creators) during 2020 and 2021 to convey COVIDSafe health messages to culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) youth. Influencers were recruited by a third-party media agency that worked with them to develop short videos comprised of COVID-related targeted health messages and communicate these through social media (Facebook and Instagram) to followers who belonged primarily to CALD communities. Although influencers were instructed to produce messages in a serious manner that complied with the tone and identity of much COVID-19 health communication (Cover, 2021), findings from the evaluation demonstrated a desire among both influencer and audience interviewees that the campaign content would have been more effective, appealing and successful if the influencers – all of whom were entertainers, musicians and athletes – had packaged their messages in a more entertaining manner.
Following a brief review of key themes in recent theory and literature on the role of entertainment in health communication assessed from the perspective of contemporary social media influencers’ increasingly important role in the media and information ecology, we present a short summary of the campaign and its evaluation. We then outline how the interviews with influencers and audience members revealed three key insights on the role of entertainment in the specific shifts in health communication warranted by the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and the urgency by which many jurisdictions required appealing, targeted yet information-heavy content to be accessed by target audiences: (1) that aligning important health-related content with the entertainment practices of micro-celebrity influencers drew on existing brand strategies; (2) that entertainment may help increase the virality, sharing and memorability of health communication content; and (3) that balancing entertainment with increased credibility and trust-generating elements in content has potential greater value in future health communication campaigns in an era marked by pandemic disinformation.
Entertainment in health communication
The impact of social media influencers within the media and digital ecology has arguably been of such significance that it has disrupted ordinary and recognised distinctions between genres deployed in a range of communication, primarily because influencers utilise entertainment, humour, comedy, arts and music often in relation to topics that have traditionally excluded these modes of communication, such as political opinion, social commentary, education and well-being (Bause, 2021; Abidin, 2018). For example, third-party communicators who deploy entertainment to maximise engagement and relevance to youth audiences have eclipsed the public pedagogies of sexual health (Cover et al., 2020; Gordon and Gere, 2016). The influencer–entertainment compact, therefore, provides a useful lens by which to assess recent literature and practice on the role and utility of entertainment (including but not limited to humour) in wider health communication, including pandemic-related crisis and urgent health messaging.
Although there have been scholarly and strategic advances in the use of entertainment education in health communication practices, in the context of pandemic-related information, health communication remains broadly perceived as a form of communication that is serious, informational, factual and undertaken within the framework of ‘serious’ risk management to produce an intended impact in behaviour or attitude change (Thompson and Harrington, 2021). Many analyses of the effectiveness of pandemic-related health messages focus on advertising and information channels, analysing the quality and veracity of health messaging, particularly in relation to consistency, understandability and capacity of audiences to process information quickly (Singh et al., 2020). This has sometimes tended to presume that audiences and users will seek and engage with urgent health messages in a concentrated mode of readership and within linear sender-message-receiver thinking. From approximately the early 2010s, some studies investigated new mechanisms for improving consumer engagement with broader health information and communication (Hurley et al., 2009; Mittler et al., 2013), particularly in relation to engaging younger people (e.g., Albury, 2019; McKee et al., 2018). These included the assessment of trials and recommendations to build health communication messaging practices that purposefully combined pedagogical strategies with entertainment modes of presentation. Less attention has been paid, however, to health communication that introduces entertainment using third-party social media influencers and micro-celebrities known already to followers for the entertainment value of their online content, including those who share minority identity with a marginalised community of followers.
The use of social media is a known mechanism for targeting health messages that would otherwise not be accessed through mainstream health communication, news services and advertising (Freeman et al., 2015; Shi et al., 2018). The rise over the past decade of micro-celebrities who take on – consciously or unwittingly – the cultural role of influencers as a vocation, form of employment and lived experience has provided an opportunity for connectivity with audiences that are more difficult among other kinds of celebrities. Such authenticity in the communication practices of influencers is typically produced through direct-to-followers communication that is presented in tones of honesty, creativity and a disavowal of traditional media practices such as professionalism in videography (Schouten et al., 2020; Uzunoğlu and Kip, 2014). At the same time, passion about an area of interest has often positioned influencers as having not only lived experience but also expertise in that area that challenges authorised, institutional knowledge frameworks and communication modes (Audrezet et al., 2017). Although influencers carefully craft this ‘personal brand’, to enable the financial aspects of devoting large amounts of time to building and curating online content, they are often sponsored by enterprises who benefit by reaching potential consumers they otherwise could not through traditional communication (Hearn and Schoenhoff, 2015). By doing this, organisations hope to draw on influencers’ positive brand image to improve the effectiveness of their own communication (Enke and Borchers, 2019). Although of course governments, charities, political parties and non-profit organisations have regularly drawn on traditional celebrities to bolster the reception of a message, the model deployed by enterprises is arguably a model that is being taken up by health authorities to communicate urgent health messages, although with varying degrees of success given, as we shall demonstrate, differing practices in relation to the entertainment factor in influencer content creation.
The COVID-19 CALD youth content campaign and the evaluation
The findings of the current study were generated in the context of a commissioned evaluation of the State Government of Victoria's CALD Youth Content Campaign 2020–2021 undertaken by the authors. Australia has a sizeable CALD population, with over one-quarter of the population born overseas, and one-fifth of Australian residents speaking one of 300 languages other than English at home (Pham et al., 2021). Young people in CALD communities are commonly known to take on extra roles in their family including navigating information, services and resources; serving as interpreters or translators, and mentoring younger siblings, parents and other adults in relation to health and well-being (Couch et al., 2021; Macnamara and Camit, 2017).
Across Australia, public education campaigns related to COVID-19 have been relatively successful in reaching the majority of the population but have been notably less so when attempting to reach CALD populations (Nutbeam, 2021; Silva, 2020). The CALD Youth Content Campaign sought to address a perceived lack of compliance and knowledge among CALD communities about COVID-19 health and safety practices and behaviours, to reduce the risk of spread among communities understood to be at higher risk, and to target communication to members who were understood to be less likely to engage with official channels such as news and mainstream advertising. It aimed to utilise extant channels of engagement via everyday influencers from select CALD backgrounds who were known to have followings among young people. The campaign's themes and key messages were designed by an interdepartmental task force under the auspices of the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, with a focus on building future capacity for digital engagement across diverse communities in the delivery of important COVIDSafe information and strategies to encourage compliance with state government health measures including lockdowns, mask-wearing, vaccination and social distancing.
The campaign involved collaboration with an intermediary agency organisation that represented both high-profile and emerging celebrities, including social media influencers, primarily in the field of popular music production. Ten young social media influencers (‘trusted messengers’) were recruited from the agency's stable of public figures they represent to co-design social media content that would engage CALD youth with issues related to COVID-19 safety and awareness, and to communicate this content through social media channels not generally accessible to government communication teams. In the Australian context, the Campaign was novel in its participatory, inclusive and digitally innovative approach. It created opportunities for digital engagement that extend beyond a one-to-one, linear delivery model through which most contemporary pandemic-related health communication was actualised. Furthermore, it followed a pattern in other, international jurisdictions of drawing on influencers to help reinforce and sustain targeted information about the importance of compliance COVID-19 health regulations (Iacobucci, 2021). The Campaign was, therefore, aligned with extant knowledge frameworks that recognise social media's potential to circumvent the usual one-way communication of government and institutional messages by empowering third parties to encourage user engagement among population groups who suffer from known health disparities (Crivellaro et al., 2019; Vereen et al., 2021).
The social media influencers worked with staff from the third-party agency to design and build a series of twenty 15–60 s video messages that communicated core messages about COVID-19 safety. All content was approved by the agency prior to being shared online via the influencers’ Instagram and Facebook accounts. Health messages incorporated into the content included staying safe through social distancing, compliance with mask mandates, hand sanitation, sports equipment sanitation and avoiding handshakes; the pleasure of coming to the end of a lockdown period; and remaining positive during the difficult period of the pandemic. In all cases, the influencers themselves were the primary individuals delivering the message direct to camera, although two incorporated footage interacting with friends or family. Most were providing content that was delivered in the style of a formal public service announcement or PSA (Heniks Vettehen and Kleemans, 2019). In about 20% of cases, some humour was incorporated in the form of a blooper or ‘silly’ moment in the final few seconds of the video.
The study from which data for the present paper was drawn was an evaluation of the benefits, needs, risks and effectiveness of the Campaign with a specific focus on recommending refinements for future government communication to target minority communities through influencers via social media. Qualitative data was collected through semi-structured interviews from 13 participants. Three participants were micro-celebrity influencers known to migrant community audiences as musicians and entertainers who had gained a local or national following through their social media presence, were provided to the researchers for interview by the intermediary talent management organisation and were paid for their time. The influencer participants were selected for the evaluation to provide ‘deep dive’ information about their experiences of the campaign, its practices of content development and their views on how to improve this new practice for pandemic-related targeted health messaging, thereby providing a suitable snapshot of the production perspective.
Ten target audience participants were recruited from a pool of 20 respondents to a survey distributed via the same social media channels used by the campaign's influencers. Interviewees were chosen for a cross-section of Australian CALD community membership, and their willingness to discuss their COVID-19 health safety practices were selected to provide a perspective on audience attitudes to the campaign's effectiveness. Eight of the 10 target audience participants identified as women, and ages ranged from 18 to 30 years. Target audience participants’ length of time in Australia ranged from 4 years for two participants to 24 years for two participants. Target audience participants self-identified with a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds including Asian, Australian, Black African, Chinese (two participants), Chinese-Singaporean, Indian, interracial, Malay Australian, Malaysian and Sri Lankan. Three participants viewed the content produced by at least one of the influencers who had developed content for the campaign every day, three viewed their content a few times a week, two few times a month, and two less than once a month.
Interview questions posed to the influencers concerned their experiences developing the content, including any challenges and suggestions for improvement, working through the multi-agency environment, and providing content that supported the Government of Victoria's health communication campaigns. Interviews with target audience participants included questions about their opinions of the content, their perception of its likely impact, their views and recommendations on the contents’ form, type and style, and their perception of the wider program and the State Government's health communication campaigns. Respecting local COVID-19 lockdown provisions by hosting the interviews via real-time video calls, the interviews were conducted in English and were recorded and auto-transcribed by Microsoft Teams. Audience interview transcripts were coded using NVivo qualitative data analysis software, and the influencer transcripts were manually coded. The researchers used thematic analysis following a process outlined by Green et al. (2007), whereby themes were identified iteratively using the concurrent techniques of (1) discussion among the research team, (2) alignment with literature on targeted messaging, health communication and CALD-targeted communication as well as accounts of the experiences of third-party influencers in other fields in order to understand the significance of the findings and inform future health communication strategies, and (3) triangulating data, including data drawn from textual analyses of the campaign content, in order to discern patterns evident across the two cohorts. 1
Although the study was not specifically seeking information about the value of entertaining posts vis-à-vis credibility, a number of key insights emerged on this topic, with three key findings: (a) that the targeted health messaging is both easier to create and more amenable to audiences when aligned with the ‘entertainment’ brand (e.g., musician and comedian) for which a social media influencer is known; (b) that audience members felt that even in relation to a serious topic such as COVID-19 health measures compliance, the messages would be more easily shared (‘made viral’) the more entertaining the message; and (c) that there is a perceived need to balance the entertainment value of the message with credibility – including referencing official sources and incorporating government branding – given the significance of targeted health messages during a campaign and in the context of widespread disinformation about COVID-19 during the pandemic. We will discuss each of these three key findings in turn.
Aligning practice and following with content type and style
As content creators, social media influencers take advantage of the democratisation of digital media that permits everyday users to become public figures through direct and targeted engagement with niche groups and online communities that consume regular content circulated by those influencers. Defined as a ‘new type of independent third-party endorsers who shape audience attitudes through blogs, tweets, and other social media applications’ (Freberg et al. 2011: 90), influencers narrate their life and share their expertise online (Abidin, 2018; Lou and Yuan, 2019). Differentiated from more traditional media and communication professionals, such as those in marketing, advertising, broadcast creative producers and influencers are notable for generating a following by building particularly strong relationships with their followers (Enke and Borchers, 2019). Influencers, as Abidin (2018: 14–15) has noted, are those who have actively groomed, curated and developed their micro-celebrity by garnering a following through anchoring their thematic content to followers through attraction to their content, while including everydayness to maintain authenticity.
Although the influencers recruited by the third-party agency were willing participants in the campaign, several expressed concern about the ability to maintain a consistent brand, image, tone and style while creating health promotion and COVID-19 safety content in the form outlined by the campaign requirements. That is, the nature of the campaign arrangement and the coaching from the third-party organisation encouraged the influencers to produce what was labelled ‘serious’ health content in a style that came closer to the public service announcement (PSA) genre. As one influencer interviewed for the evaluation described the imperative: ‘There was a balance where like it can't be too preachy but also can't be too playful ‘cause this is like a serious matter, you know’ (Eufrasia – a pseudonym). This was a particular point of tension for the influencers interviewed who felt that – as musicians and entertainers – their followers would be less likely to understand why they were suddenly sharing content that differed from their ordinary brand.
One poignant example was articulated by Jabulani (a pseudonym) who felt there was a dissonance resulting from being asked to post health messages on her primary social media account which usually contained posts related to her music and upcoming gigs. Followers of her primary account are her music fans, whereas most of the followers of the second account are, like herself, parents who are interested in engaging with the content that shares life experiences relating to parenting. Jabulani was commissioned to post the health messages to her music-related social media accounts, which had a greater number of followers. However, she felt the health messages she created for the campaign, which focused on being a mother and parenthood, fit her second account better: I have two Instagram accounts. I have one where I'm a mum, and then I have one where I'm the artist and my artistry. Because I had no gigs, I had nothing coming up, and my only extracurricular activity outside of music [during the lockdowns] was being a parent. It was kind of a bit of a disconnect between sort of connecting with my audience that watch my content for music (Jabulani).
The example illustrates the challenge of aligning commissioned health messages with one's own brand and the need for traditional ‘communication professionals’ involved in campaign management to trust social media influencers’ knowledge about their followers’ tastes, practices of subscription and brand alignment. Jabulani was used to generating engagement with her followers and was comfortable developing music and parent-focused content tailored to separate accounts and separate online ‘identities’ in a practice of ‘curation’ that has become normative across social media users more generally (Cover, 2012). However, the client chose the commissioned content and the target audience (her music Instagram account followers). Therefore, the health message, form, style and tone had been set by the client, which was an experience that fell outside the ordinary practices of an influencer who was used to managing and creating their own content without substantial third-party oversight. In Jabulani's view, the misalignment between health-related content presented in a ‘serious’ tone, her previous content that was focused on music and entertainment, and the preferences of her audience and followers reduced the capacity of the message to work effectively.
Although Jabulani was the only influencer in the Campaign who had, effectively, ‘tested’ the appeal of the content by posting it to two accounts, two other influencer interviewees expressed similar issues with the message not aligning with their audience. Mary (a pseudonym) stated, ‘The video itself was not irritating me, [it] was just the aesthetic on my grid that was like this just doesn't look good… That's why I chose to archive it’ (rather than retain it among the corpus of available, curated posts). By the time of the interviews, which were held within one month of the final postings from that phase of the campaign, all influencer interviewees stated that they had archived the commissioned content from their profile once their contracts on the campaign were complete, and that they were aware most of their peers in the campaign had done likewise.
Creative tensions are, therefore, at play when influencers are commissioned to produce and share health messages on behalf of government campaigns seeking opportunities for greater outreach to niche and marginalised communities. When commissioning and third-party content management organisations direct the tone, form and style of the content, rather than only the message itself, influencers face issues relating to how they fit that content into their ‘brand’. An influencer's brand and following are built upon a range of factors, but central to that is the consistency across content that draws followers back and increases their following over time. A vital characteristic of influencers is therefore that they amass followers on social media through curation and generating appeal (Haenlein et al., 2020; De Veirman et al., 2017), stabilising their content production, form and style over time (Abidin, 2018) into what can be considered a brand (Sinnig, 2019). Although there are many cases in which social media influencers generate and expand interest through shifts in tone or style, unexpected content and the capacity to surprise (Abidin and Cover, 2018), consistency with the brand, following, genre and style remain at the core of the communicative mechanisms by which influencers maintain their capacity to have an appeal for – and impact upon – their followers and audiences.
Entertainment increases memorability and virality
Social media reach, view and share data were provided to the researchers by the third-party agency. Although this did not include comparative data for the influencers involved in the project or other influencers represented by the agency, most of the influencers interviewed reported they felt the content was not shared at the rate they anticipated and at a rate lower than their more entertaining content. We turn here to some of the audience interview responses which provided insights about the use of entertainment to increase the spread and virality of third-party health messages. The capacity to share short messages virally across one or more platforms is a key advantage of the marketability of micro-celebrities and social media influencers (Abidin, 2018: 47–48) but depends very much on careful strategies to target, cultivate and hone audience tastes, as well as develop what Zhang and Huang (2022) identified as ‘influencer attraction’, that is, tailoring the product in ways which attract additional followers, which might include beauty, interest, information, entertainment or the capacity to create a sensation.
McKee (2016: 5–6) noted that the value of entertainment media is traditionally differentiated from other creative and cultural production that is perceived to have ‘purpose’, usually to create a thought, raise a standard of engagement, create an aesthetic aura, civilise humanity and so on. Entertainment, on the other hand, has been distinguished for its less utilitarian capacity to produce amusement, operate as a diversion or produce laughter – and these are typically understood to be ends in themselves (29–31). However, one of the key aspects of entertainment – or having fun – is that it is often understood as an act of cultural communion or sharing and that, in the act of sharing entertainment (which literally means ‘holding together’), it creates a community by having a common element among that group (13, 22). That is, media content we feel is entertaining, playful, comedic or produces sensational emotions is more likely to be shared because, unlike high art or informational texts that are often consumed alone (Storey, 1993), the value of the material is found in the act of sharing, and online material that has comedic value is now recognised as more likely to be shared (Albury, 2019). In relation to influencer content, recent literature has found that entertaining and comedic content is more likely to gain audience attention, sharing and be retained by viewers (Colleague and Author1, 2018).
Audience participants interviewed for the evaluation stated they were attracted to social media content with entertainment value and suggested that the social media campaign would have been enhanced by the inclusion of more humour; many participants contrasted the campaign content with other social media health messaging they had encountered during the lockdown periods of the pandemic that they found more entertaining or amusing. For example, Tam described a video she had viewed on social media that was understood to have been produced by a group who were supporting international students in the pandemic. She said it was a comical production of young international students: who are trying to use a very hilarious way to talk about [how] you have to do this, you have to do that. And it was kind of, um, really like you don't feel like sad. You don't feel like, oh, it's lockdown we have to do this again. You just feel like it's very cheerful (Tam). If it is like a video like Jabulani's one, if I don't know her then maybe I wouldn't stay, but it's like more like the young international student style, kind of funny and hilarious, maybe I would stay (Tam).
It was notable that the student video was virally shared (how Tam encountered it), whereas the engagement figures collected by the influencers and the third-party organisation indicated good engagement by comments and likes, but relatively low rates of on-sharing figures for the campaign content. We speculate that the absence of entertainment appeal to the influencers’ followers positioned the content as less likely to be shared because the act of sharing reflects on the followers themselves and how they are perceived by third parties.
Abdul described how some examples of social media content communicated by other influencers were memorable because they were amusing: I think that's like a smart way to get people involved like, you know, comedic sense. Like um like that just made me remember it. You know, like even though it has nothing to do with COVID directly. (Abdul)
Entertaining and credible
Although the first two frameworks emerging from the study confirmed the growing understanding of the value of entertainment to communicate serious health messages (McKee et al., 2018), the third indicates a more novel finding: a perceived need to balance entertainment with credibility and trust beyond the ordinary trust in following a micro-celebrity influencer. This may be an issue that becomes more marked in the context of the ‘crisis’ mode of COVID-19 pandemic-related health communication (Author1, 2021) and the widespread recognition that health advice compliance had a direct correlation with serious and immediate health outcomes (Depoux et al., 2020). For reasons that related ostensibly to government sign-off protocols, it was agreed that the content creators involved in the campaign would produce their content without using state government logo or branding or – since it was third-party content – the government authorisation statement on a closing black screen that is a statutory requirement for government communication (Government of Victoria, 2022). The framework by which the content was distributed as apparently non-government information may have been a strategy to reach migrant and CALD communities in Australia that have a known reduced trust in government and institutional health messages (Ward et al., 2015). However, several interviewees noted that the lack of appearance or evidence of a government source for the health messages or the wider campaign, arguing that it was a missed opportunity to bolster audience and public trust in the messages themselves.
Most audience/follower participants said they were not aware that they had viewed content developed at the request of the State Government of Victoria. Several participants indicated that it could be a missed opportunity for the government department to showcase partnerships with CALD influencers. Most participants welcomed information given during interviews that the campaign was government-funded and expressed positive attitudes towards the news that the campaign was initiated by the government to engage influencers to circulate important COVID-related health messages to CALD communities. Nevertheless, there were some concerns raised about whether or not obscuring the government's initiation of the campaign and its funding had a negative impact on the quality of information. Ana (a pseudonym), for example, noted that the influencer content she viewed was not clearly identified as a project affiliated with the Victorian Government, stating: ‘I initially thought that this was just something that she had sort of done out of her own desire’. Another audience interviewee, Charlie, noted that if the CALD influencer messages were transparent in their collaboration with the Victorian Government, then it might have improved her attitude toward the government's effort to reach CALD groups. She said, ‘I think […] if it was sponsored by Vic Gov and you saw it, you’d be like huh! The government really is trying to reach people’. Abdul also appreciated the State Government involving CALD influencers in health messaging; he said, ‘I'd be actually more happy probably that he [the Premier] brought like someone like [notable micro-celebrity influencer] on to do a quick bit on Coronavirus’.
Communicating science-based health information in the form, style and tone of pedagogy or informational bulletins has proven challenging recently (Penders et al., 2017), especially to young people, and in some health communication areas, the balance needed for successful messaging between pedagogy and the kinds of entertainment framework we described above has become a more significant area of investigation (Molenaar et al., 2020). The inclusion of entertainment as a motivation to make health-related messages less ‘boring’ (Barklamb et al., 2020) often involves contrasting entertainment with public service information broadcasts that are distinctive in noting their government authorisation. In light of some of the comments from audience interviewees, we argue that COVID-19 health messaging using third-party entertainer-based influencers would be more effective if presented as entertainment but, at the same time, utilise the signifiers and markers of credibility, such as health authority endorsement, government branding and logos. This reduces the likelihood of the message appearing as ‘mere’ opinion – an important consideration given the involvement of high-profile social media users and wellness influencers in circulating COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation (Bruns et al., 2020; Depoux et al., 2020).
In this context, recognising that ‘trust’ is an issue for all communication artefacts, whether serious or entertaining is a key strategy necessary for ensuring that third-party health communication undertaken by influencers will work. Flew (2019) has described the current era of media and communication as one marked by a ‘crisis of trust’, whereby there is an added need in all communication forms to pay attention to the cues that mark content as ‘having’ credibility (Szostek, 2018). Although influencers may already have garnered the trust of their followers, there are two factors at play: one, that this trust is conditional on the sustained attractiveness of the influencer, which includes consistency in style and tone over time (Wiedmann and Mettenheim, 2021) and, secondly, that a substantial shift in tone that ‘stands out’ – such as the provision of impersonal and serious health information messages rather than entertainment, music or personal – creates distrust by requiring audiences to undertake additional labour to recognise the content as credible and therefore trustworthy. Indeed, increasingly recognised implications of the way in which the added labour required to verify information quality is reducing the effectiveness of message credibility (Dobson-Lohman and Potcovaru, 2020), suggesting that third-party health messages using entertainment may benefit substantially from mechanisms that underscore their credibility and authority.
What is perhaps most significant in this finding is that while entertainment (particularly music, humour and self-deprecation) and authenticity (personal stories and personal fails) are both key components in re-packaging serious, factual and timely informational content in a way that is appealing, memorable and engaging, credibility is perceived as more important today in an era marked by disinformation and bias. Underscoring a humorous or entertaining message with credibility does not, as Abdul noted, require returning to staid formality or a ‘serious tone’. Rather, third-party influencers’ content benefits from adequately combining entertainment and credibility – which are not mutually exclusive – and participants felt this was best achieved by underscoring the source and its relationship to a wider campaign through the simplicity of a logo. This point has implications for how future government-funded third-party campaigns can be incorporated into the practices around government messaging and statutory notification protocols, requiring shifts in both strategic communication and legal frameworks to remain up-to-date with emergent uses of third-party influencers in health messaging.
Conclusion
During pandemics, the quality and reach of health messages have both importance and urgency, and the use of third-party influencers to build and distribute government-aligned health communication has substantial capacity to access hard-to-reach and at-higher-risk communities, including among young people from CALD backgrounds. The evaluation of the Victorian Government campaign found that participants felt the campaign had the potential to improve attitudes towards COVIDSafe measures and to make Angleton behaviour change by reinforcing community knowledge on health and safety to audiences. The use of popular social media influencers to re-package key themes for audiences who may be difficult to reach through traditional government communication and mainstream media channels is an important step in taking advantage of some of the new cultural developments and affordances of digital culture.
This study indicated that the involvement, inclusion and use of social media influencers alone is not always enough to produce messages that they or their audiences will appreciate and respect, and that this is particularly the case if the campaign content development is managed by third-party agencies that may not have a clear appreciation of the need for entertainment-based influencers to be consistent with their entertainment-based content in order to protect their brand and to have their followers engage with the material in ways they find memorable and then on-share or forward to other users. At the same time, the study indicated the need for close attention to balance in several respects in the case of using third-party influencers to communicate government-sponsored health messages. On the one hand, there is value as we have described in increasing the entertainment framework and avoiding using the ‘seriousness’ of the genre of the PSA to connote the importance of the content. On the other hand, while increasing the entertainment elements such as humour or, in the case of the social media influencers in this campaign, their music, there is value in adopting the typical markers of credibility such as government branding, logos and authorisation so that target audiences recognise the source. Arguably, this has become more important in an era of disinformation than attempting to avoid institutional linkage to communities that may previously have been resistant to authorised knowledge frameworks.
The study provided new data on the relationships between government health communication and third-party influencers, and between entertainment and serious health messaging in the context of one of the most serious health concerns in Australia in a century requiring substantial regulation of behaviour and clarity of communication. However, the method was limited by the evaluation framework that provided access to a small sample of influencers, albeit comprising nearly one-third of the participants utilised in the campaign. Further depth in understanding the significance of credibility in ‘entertaining’ content by third-party influencers used in government communication campaigns calls for further studies that cross-analyse these findings with campaigns occurring outside the ‘crisis mode’ of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
