Productive or Pushy? How NYC’s COVID Campaigns are Working to Stop the Spread.
[INSERT DEK]
Standing in the Canal Street subway station, at least half a dozen people breeze by me, maskless and carefree, blatantly disregarding the unmissable signage instructing them to follow the basic COVID protocols seared into all of our brains by now. On an empty R train, a family dressed in semi-formal attire exchange laughs in what would normally be a sweet scene. But their maskless smiles suggest a laxness towards the pandemic guidelines plastered above their seats that forces me to question just how effective these posters and signs can be.
After being one of the pandemic’s top picks for landfall, New York City health and government officials have taken fervent efforts to ensure that the city is not massacred again. A plethora of PSAs have been produced and disseminated through television, social media, various establishments, public transportation and more. Take a ride on any subway or bus, for example, and you’ll likely be enveloped by a sea of yellow posters and signs that are meant to be playful yet emit an ominous tone in warning us to mask up and social distance.
But whether or not they’re still working is a different story. True, the majority of riders are continuing to mask up, but it would be overly idealistic to assume that these innocent smiley faces or ads will persuade typically unbothered New Yorkers a year and a half into the pandemic to follow guidelines, especially those already opposed to what they might call “oppressive” mandates. The degree to whether or not people will comply seems to be largely based on free will, not easily neglectable external factors. So now the question is: what actually works?
In July of 2020, months after COVID ravaged the city, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority launched “Operation Respect”: a campaign intended to educate the public on proper pandemic etiquette, as well as urge them to follow guidelines set forth by the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop the spread. Public transportation is a lifeline in New York City, especially for essential workers that were forced to continue working even through the darkest days of the outbreak, resulting in the deaths of more than 100 MTA team members.
“It’s all about education,” says Michael Cortez, a media relations representative from the MTA. Cortez described the campaign as omnipresent and adoptive of an “in your face” tactic constantly reminding riders to stay safe.
But when asked about whether or not he believes increased signage can provoke people to mask up, Cortez replied, “I don’t think you can ever make a direct correlation onto human behavior.”
Over the summer, as fears of COVID subsided, so did mask usage. As a result, the MTA announced increased mask enforcement in September, initiating a $50 fine for non-compliance with the federal requirement for masking-wearing on trains, buses and paratransit vehicles.
“It’s more of just getting back to what worked in 2020,” Cortez says. The MTA is attempting to uphold its campaign’s original mission as the more contagious Delta variant and decreased mask usage, threatens the progress of vaccines. And though COVID cases are on the decrease nationwide, the city currently sees 27.3% of its residents unvaccinated, according to the New York City Department of Health, who have also established a $125 million media campaign designed to promote safety and target communities with lower vaccination rates. NYC Health was reached out to for this story, but have yet to respond.
Also fundamental to the success of these campaigns is cultural accessibility. In order to reach all communities, particularly minorities hardest hit by the pandemic, the city has ensured that their communications are accessible to everyone. In speaking with Dionne, a New York City government representative, she reminds me that COVID posters are available in English, Spanish, Chinese and more, demonstrating the city’s efforts to create a diverse and representative campaign that effectively disseminates necessary information to all corners of New York.
“If people want to start going out again, they’re gonna have to follow the rules”, Dionne adds. “Being how those signs are everywhere, it stands to reason that they would have to do that.”
Deborah Broderick, New York University’s Vice President of Marketing Communications, supports this notion. “Ideally a communicator will want to saturate the landscape so posters and flyers, email, broadcast, social media, etc. are natural channels of media,” she explains, implying that repetition and mere exposure to these types of communications allow them to wiggle their way into our minds and influence decision making. The city has clearly taken this approach to heart; it seems as though cable television has been infiltrated by a fleet of commercials advertising vaccination and other COVID precautions.
However, Broderick also advises, “The mistake is to posit that somehow communications are the only tool in the tool box”, suggesting that it is not purely the responsibility of the messages to influence people to do the right thing. So while these campaigns might be highly powerful strategies towards stopping the spread, we can find solace in the fact that they are not sole determinants of such consequential decisions.
Though the future of the pandemic remains unclear, for now we can accept repetitive exposure, education and representation in city campaigns and communications as effective tools for combating COVID and bringing back New York City.
