The initial idea for the “Zoo Moms” ad came from discussion around the idea of gender-targeted misinformation. This was touched upon in our first ad “Buy This Idea!” where we covered tactics like Truth from Sport that traditionally appeal more to men. For this ad, we wanted to cover a type of misinformation often targeted more at women: medical misinformation, specifically as it pertains to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Research shows that women are more likely to seek out and use CAM (Alwhaibi & Sambamoorthi, 2016), in addition to being a larger portion of both the consumer and provider base of CAM (Shavhisi, 2018). When asked, women tend to identify personal beliefs, cost of standard medical treatment, and dissatisfaction with standard medical treatment as being the top reasons they seek out CAM (Chao et al., 2006). Women are also more likely to experience health-related anxiety (Gedik et al., 2023), which increases the likelihood of believing and sharing health misinformation (Pan, Liu, & Fang, 2021). Rather than engaging an us vs them mentality, much of the misinformation involving CAM is more positively appealing. Women can feel they are being better listened to than with standard medicine, as well as feeling they’re providing the best care for themselves and their loved ones – especially their children.

We created a fictional “movement” for the target character in our ad (Cookie) to be newly involved with. The idea of a “Body Knows Best” movement acts as a stand-in for many movements ostensibly centered around a more “naturalistic” approach to healing. These movements encourage the idea that your body knows better than anyone how to fix what’s wrong with it. While bodily attunement is not inherently bad, and may have certain benefits, the nuance of using this in conjunction with standard medicine is often absent. We took this to its most absurd extremes by having a character who believed her children’s poor eye-sight would naturally fix itself without glasses. Importantly, and as with previous ads, the friend (Rita) who is pushing back about those beliefs is trying to do so in a compassionate, non-judgmental manner.