How are you all doing? I’m definitely in a food coma and I can’t really see any of you because I’m blinded by food. How would you think of the first seven minutes in heaven with a scientist? Really? Just that much? What did you really think about seven minutes in heaven with a scientist? It was so good. Thank you, Julia. I am so excited for the next seven minutes in heaven with a scientist. We are going to go into the closet with one of my favorite academic crushes, whose name comes up all the time when I’m doing research. We are going into the closet with Dr. Jeff Niter Deppy. I really hope I said that correctly, Jeff. I’m sorry if I didn’t. He is an associate professor in the Department of Communications at Cornell. He is a prolific writer whose research has been funded by the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, United States Department of Agriculture, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Jeff studies mass media, campaigns, strategic health messages, and news coverage in shaping health behavior. He also studies health disparities and social policy. So are you all ready to meet Jeff? All right, hit it. We don’t have to get in there, do we? You might if we give you $10,000. Why don’t you scooch that right over there? Okay. Thank you, Jeff, for joining us. It’s my pleasure to be here. So let’s just jump into it. What are you passionate about? Well, I would say I think many people in the audience here share my concern that in this country we tend to value private profits over public interest. And in my view, there’s no place that that’s clearer than in population health. So in our country, we spend more money on healthcare by a huge margin than any other country in the world. But according to the World Health Organization, we rank 37th in the actual health of our population right there with Slovenia and Cuba. And so it’s not that we have bad healthcare. It’s that the environment, the built environment, the physical environment, the marketing environment is all stacked against us to undermine our health. So I’m passionate about changing that. So what’s the research question that keeps you up at night? Well, I’ll be honest. It’s my one-year-old and four-year-old that tend to keep me up at night. But when I’m up with them, I think about their future. And I think about the fact that if current trends continue, by the time they are pre-teens, they will be exposed to 20 food and beverage advertisements every day, one of which will be promoting a healthy product. And so the research question I ask is, how can I use my training in communication theory and research to try to even the balance between those two factors? So can you tell us all a little bit about your research? Sure. Be happy to. Well, for many health issues in this country, obesity, cancer, opioid abuse, they have one thing in common, and that is a huge, powerful industry that aggressively markets its product. And in the case of obesity, in the case of soda and cigarettes to children, and in the case of prescription pain medication by the pharmaceutical companies to doctors. These companies are very persuasive. And as you might imagine, they don’t like to be regulated. They want to market their product however they can. And they will do just about anything to try to avoid being regulated. And they’re very persuasive. And they spend tons and tons of money trying to persuade people that these policies are bad. So how do you compete with that as a public interest communicator? Well, in our study, we went with two sort of tried and true strategies. One called inoculation. And the second, storytelling, a narrative approach to try to not only persuade people that’s restricting marketing by these companies is something that’s good to do, but also to make them resilient to the inevitable onslaught of anti-policy messages that they’re likely to receive from these industries. Can you give us some examples of these two different types of messages that you’ve tested? Sure. So inoculation uses a medical analogy. You give somebody a shot. Their body learns how to fight it off. And when they’re hit with the full version of a virus, they’re resilient to that. And inoculation uses that as a metaphor and says, can we deliver a message that neutralizes and counter-argues what the opposition is going to say? So in the case of Soda, who would say things like, Soda companies are going to tell you that restricting marketing is arbitrary of their products because what about cookies and candy and other things? You’re going to say it’s a slippery slope to where we’re restricting marketing on bread and milk. But look, soda’s not food. It’s 16 teaspoons of sugar masquerading as a beverage. And they aggressively market this product to kids, to our children. And here’s what these policies would do to address that. The narrative was pretty straightforward. We told a story of Cynthia, mother of two, who was dealing with either her daughter, who was struggling with weight gain and was drinking soda on her way home, experimenting with cigarettes in the cigarette condition, and in the prescription pain medication was struggling with addiction. And so we told a story of how marketing contributes to that and how supporting policies that would restrict marketing of these products would help Cynthia and also people like her. So you tested these two messages. What did you find in your research? Yeah, so an important part of the study is everyone in the study, we took what the industry was saying about these topics and we exposed everyone to the sort of best anti-policy message we could because we wanted to see which messages were most resilient to that. And some people got it right away and some people got it after a couple weeks. Well, it was interesting. Right away we compared the effectiveness of the narrative and the story telling strategy was the clear winner. People were more likely to support these policies right away. But if some time passed, the inoculation strategy really sort of kicked in and they were more likely to counter-argue these messages, more resilient to the anti-policy message. So what does this mean then for communicators who want to use your work? Yeah, so in my mind it’s pretty straightforward. If you find yourself in a competitive situation and almost any policy issue is going to be competitive, it’s going to be an opposition. If you find yourself in a situation where you’re competing with an opponent who’s going to have a chance to communicate right away, like a debate format perhaps, then telling a short story seems to be an effective way to go. If you know there’s going to be some time between when you deliver your message and when they might be exposed to the counter message for an advertising campaign or something, then the inoculation strategy seems to have a lot of merit. Wow. So you touched on this, but why does this paper matter so much? Yeah, I would say it does a couple of things. One, we used a national sample and we talked about three different issues, soda, cigarettes, and prescription pain medication. We found the exact same pattern across all three issues, which tells us that these strategies apply across contexts. The second thing that we really tried to do in this study is to replicate how the world works. You’re communicating about policies. There’s going to be opposition. So we designed the study almost to fail by giving them this strong anti-policy message. So by finding strategies that are resilient against that, I think we hopefully do a better job of providing actionable advice to advocates who are in these competitive situations. What is the thing that you wish people would do differently then, or organizations would do differently based off of what you found? You know, I might say I’d like to eradicate the phrase, the data speaks for itself. Because of course it doesn’t. It can help you tell a story. It can help make an argument. It can help to offset somebody else’s argument. But I think our research makes clear that data by no means speak for themselves. You have to speak with them. And which person do you wish would most understand or apply your research? Oh, you know, I’ve thought about this actually. It turns out. And I’m going to say Dr. Oz. Well, hear me out. Hear me out. So he’s respected. He’s trusted. Maybe not by folks in this room. But he’s got a huge platform and he’s a great storyteller, but he’s telling the absolute worst stories about miracle, pills, and crash diets. If he really understood the research and understood how storytelling could be used for social change to offset sort of inequities and resources between industries and advocates, I think he could make a real difference, whether he would or not, that was a separate question. Do you hear that, Dr. Oz? We’re live streaming, so maybe hold on. He’ll hear us. Bring me on the show. Yeah. What are you working on next? So we are doing some work to sort of extend these studies to different kinds of policy context. So we’ve got a study where we’re looking at marketing of alcohol during sports in Australia. And we’re applying these issues to climate change communication, trying to promote activism among young people to offset the harms of climate change. And so I hope we can sort of find the same strategies working across lots of issues, which would, again, I think, speak to their application across lots of topics. All right. That’s it. We have one more question for you. You can stop that. That was quite the buzzer. We have lots of surprises here. So if you can go into the closet with one person and get to know them a little bit better, spend seven minutes in heaven with them, who would it be? Wow. Well, Annie, with your permission. I’m a musician as well. And Scott is playing some beautiful music. I’d love to join him if that’s all right. Only if you’re okay with it. Scott and I are happy to share our closet with anybody. I wonder if I can. Glad you heard it. Thank you for joining us, Jeff, everybody. Thank you.