Looi, M.-K. (2023).
BMJ.
Here are two excerpts:
Always online
A big challenge in suicide prevention is that people often experience suicidal crises at times when they’re away from clinical facilities, says Nick Allen, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon.
“It’s often in the middle of the night, so one of the great challenges is how can we be there for someone when they really need us, which is not necessarily when they’re engaged with clinical services.”
Telemedicine and other digital interventions came to prominence at the height of the pandemic, but “there’s an app for that” does not always match the patient in need at the right time. Says Onie, “The missing link is using existing infrastructure and habits to meet them where they are.”
Where they are is the internet. “When people are going through suicidal crises they often turn to the internet for information. And Google has the lion’s share of the search business at the moment,” says Allen, who studies digital mental health interventions (and has had grants from Google for his research).
Google’s core business stores information from searches, using it to fuel a highly effective advertising network in which companies pay to have links to their websites and products appear prominently in the “sponsored” sections at the top of all relevant search results.
The company holds 27.5% of the digital advertising market—earning the company around $224bn from search advertising alone in 2022.
If it knows enough about us to serve up relevant adverts, then it knows when a user is displaying red flag behaviour for suicide. Onie set out to harness this.
“It’s about the ‘attention economy,’” he says, “There’s so much information, there’s so much noise. How do we break through and make sure that the first thing that people see when they’re contemplating suicide is something that could be helpful?”
(cut)
At its peak the campaign was responding to over 6000 searches a day for each country. And the researchers saw a high level of response.
Typically, most advertising campaigns see low engagement in terms of clickthrough rates (the number of people that actually click on an advert when they see it). Industry benchmarks consider 3.17% a success. The Black Dog campaign saw 5.15% in Australia and 4.02% in the US. Preliminary data show Indonesia to be even higher—as much as 12%.
Because this is an advertising campaign, another measure is cost effectiveness. Google charges the advertiser per click on its advert, so the more engaged an audience is (and thus what Google considers to be a relevant advert to a relative user) the higher the charge. Black Dog’s campaign saw such a high number of users seeing the ads, and such high numbers of users clicking through, that the cost was below that of the industry average of $2.69 a click—specifically, $2.06 for the US campaign. Australia was higher than the industry average, but early data indicate Indonesia was delivering $0.86 a click.
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I could not find a free pdf. The link above works, but is paywalled. Sorry. :(
