Sometimes, the elephant in the room is a virus.

The coronavirus that started in late 2019 was a worldwide crisis by 2020. But a short three years later, U.S. citizens worn out by years of worry didn’t want to hear about the virus anymore.

This “COVID fatigue” became a challenge for Well Done Marketing and its healthcare marketing team to overcome in 2023, when Eskenazi Health—Indiana’s oldest public healthcare system—asked us to help them increase COVID-19 vaccinations at a time when the pandemic clouds seemed to be clearing.

Mask mandates were being lifted. People no longer hummed “Happy Birthday” while washing their hands. Once-remote workers were exchanging Zoom meetings for face-to-face ones. And nearly everyone wanted to believe that the coronavirus no longer posed a serious threat to them or their families.

Except that it did. Particularly to young children and seniors.

So how were we going to lure audiences’ attention back to a topic that they desperately wanted to put behind them?

We needed an approach that would capture people’s interest, then make the case for vaccination in a gentle, logical, and irresistible way.

Our everyday lives are filled with vexations. Like dashing to reach a ringing phone only to hear a robocall. Or hunting fruitlessly for the car keys you just set down a few minutes ago. Or discovering the wrong food order in your drive-thru bag once you’ve arrived home.

But while most of life’s problems are beyond our control, there are some we have the power to prevent. And COVID is one of them.

The campaign we created for Eskenazi Health urged people to “prevent the worries you can,” by visiting the network’s health centers to get a vaccination or booster shot to protect themselves and their families against COVID (and flu, during winter months). We started by creating a landing page on EskenaziHealth.edu that helped visitors find nearby vaccine locations. We told them what to bring with them and let them know what to expect once they got there. We offered information on vaccines and provided answers to frequently asked questions—clearing up confusion and correcting misinformation.

To remind audiences that ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away, we used approachable illustrations  throughout the campaign that reflected our audience’s demographics and showed people of all ages getting the protection they needed to control viruses and live worry-free lives.

We made animated videos for broadcast (and for online use, because we would never overlook healthcare digital marketing), that showed families going about their daily business, while whimsically-drawn viruses shadowed them. Once vaccinated by Eskenazi Health personnel, our characters freed themselves from worries about missing school, missing work, or missing social get-togethers.

The same light tone was used for radio ads, which contrasted the worries that science is helpless against—such as dirty dishes, or kids leaving caps off markers—against the coronavirus it can protect you from.

We used other media—ranging from print ads to brochures to banners both digital and literal—to remind audiences that Eskenazi Health offered COVID vaccines and boosters for everyone from 6-month-olds to seniors.

We also brought our worry-centric message to shopping malls (which were once again filling with people and the potential to spread viral infection). A prominently placed digital kiosk pointed out that while there is no vaccine against poorly-fitting pants or creepy mannequins, there are easily-accessible shots for COVID.

Though COVID-19 is no longer an official public health emergency in the U.S., it—like the flu—shows no signs of disappearing entirely. But we’re pleased to have created a campaign that can be used by Eskenazi Health as long as it is needed in the years to come. And though we’re not exclusively a healthcare marketing agency, we’re proud to know that Well Done has played an important role in encouraging our fellow Hoosiers to control the worries they can—by getting the vaccines they need.