The Doctors for Coronavirus Prevention Project Thanksgiving / Christmas Messaging Campaign

Covid19 Clinical Trial

Official title:

The Doctors for Coronavirus Prevention Project Thanksgiving / Christmas Messaging Campaign

Clinical Trial Details — Status: Completed

Administrative data

• NCT number: NCT04644328
• Other study ID #: 2003000118A010
• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: November 12, 2020
• Est. completion date: February 11, 2021

Study information

• Verified date: December 2021
• Source: National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
• Contact: n/a
• Is FDA regulated: No
• Study type: Interventional

Clinical Trial Summary

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.

Description:

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?

Recruitment information / eligibility

• Status: Completed
• Enrollment: 820
• Est. completion date: February 11, 2021
• Est. primary completion date: February 11, 2021
• Accepts healthy volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers
• Gender: All
• Age group: 18 Years and older

Eligibility

Inclusion Criteria:

• Individuals viewing the ads must be Facebook users, 18 years and older. Facebook will decide specifically which users receive the messages within a target geographical area (zip or county).

Exclusion Criteria:

-

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Coronavirus Infections
• Covid19

Intervention

Behavioral:
• Facebook Ads on the importance of staying safe during the Thanksgiving / Christmas holiday
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.

Locations

Country	Name	City	State
United States	JPAL North America	Cambridge	Massachusetts

Sponsors (6)

Lead Sponsor	Collaborator
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.	Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Yale University

Country where clinical trial is conducted

United States, 

References & Publications (1)

Breza E, Stanford FC, Alsan M, Alsan B, Banerjee A, Chandrasekhar AG, Eichmeyer S, Glushko T, Goldsmith-Pinkham P, Holland K, Hoppe E, Karnani M, Liegl S, Loisel T, Ogbu-Nwobodo L, Olken BA, Torres C, Vautrey PL, Warner ET, Wootton S, Duflo E. Effects of — View Citation

Outcome

Type	Measure	Description	Time frame	Safety issue
Primary	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.	November 26, 2020 (Thanksgiving); December 24-25, 2020 (Christmas); February 2-29, 2020 (Baseline benchmark)
Primary	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).	November 26, 2020 (Thanksgiving); December 24-25, 2020 (Christmas)
Primary	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	December 1-14 (Thanksgiving arms) and January 1-14 (Christmas arms)
Secondary	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.	up to one month
Secondary	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.	up to one month
Secondary	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.	up to one month