Printed Media

Upon receipt of approval from Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), with the assistance of the Institutional public relations and marketing teams, an initial national and local media campaign was initiated using social media, print and web-based communications of the clinical trial. A decision aid brochure was developed to describe the trial rationale, eligibility criteria, responsibility of subjects and a contact number, to be distributed at men’s health events, community medical clinic sites, churches, community organizations and pharmacies. The trial was listed in the ClinicalTrials.gov website of the National Institutes of Health. Supportive marketing and public relations departments at both sites that use community radio, newspaper and other published media advertisements, direct and indirect mailings, internet postings, development and distribution of decision aids and print media exposure of clinical trials, utilizing cultural and literacy competent and experienced teams have demonstrated success in attaining target recruitment numbers in other cancer prevention trials. However, the clinical team was conservative using this approach and, in the past, has been cautious regarding social media advertisements for clinical intervention trials [43 (link),44 (link)].

Monitoring the exposure to mass media campaigns is challenging due to the dynamic nature of the campaign rollout and massive coverage. Traditional monitoring approaches include surveys, interviews, and cohort studies [17 (link),18 (link)]. However, the relatively slow turnaround makes the approaches more suitable for a retrospective evaluation but less able to generate timely and actionable feedback.
Emerging geospatial technologies present an opportunity for frequent and rapid data collection. We collect aggregated exposure data through Cuebiq’s privacy-preserving geospatial data and analytics platform. Cuebiq partners with over 100 location-centric smartphone apps, providing a path for users to opt in and provide informed consent for their anonymized and aggregated data to be used for research purposes. In addition to its General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act–compliant data collection practices, Cuebiq applies additional privacy protections beyond simple anonymization to prevent the reidentification of individual users.
To measure campaign exposure, a digital breadcrumb known as a pixel is attached to creative media assets served through multiple advertisement media, including web, mobile, and in-app browsing. Cuebiq then generates impressions data and matches those impressions with its own panel of users in a privacy-preserving manner. Measurement data are accessed by researchers via the Cuebiq Workbench platform, an auditable sandbox environment that allows access for the querying of data and generation of aggregate, privacy-preserving outputs. The sandbox enables the creation of aggregate data at county levels, without the ability or need to create individual-level outputs.
The Cuebiq platform collects exposure information in a nearly continuous manner for each individual device. The exposure is then summarized by a binary indicator for each device, denoting whether or not it is exposed to the campaign. Finally, for each county, we calculate the number of exposed devices, the number of unexposed devices, and the exposure rate (ie, the proportion of exposed devices among all monitored devices) on a weekly basis. As described above, the “It’s Up to You” campaign uses both digital and print media to deliver the materials. Our exposure data only measure the exposure to digital contents.
The final analytical data set covers 3104 counties in 48 states and the District of Columbia. Hawaii and Alaska are excluded because the spatial model requires counties to have geographically adjacent neighbors. Ad Council campaigns and Cuebiq’s measurement campaign were launched in late February 2021, but the campaign did not reach national coverage until about one month later. Campaign activities and related exposures wound down rapidly after August. To avoid potential selection bias in early campaign rollout, our analyses only used data between March 29 and August 29, 2021. The panel’s width and length are adequate for us to include complex model components, such as the spatiotemporal correlation structure.