Georgia DPH: Restoring Trust in 2026 Ad Campaigns

In mid-2025, Sarah Chen, the Communications Director for Georgia’s Department of Public Health (GDPH), had a problem. The agency was on the hook to launch a massive statewide campaign for early cancer screenings, with a hard goal of cutting late-stage diagnoses by 15% in three years. But their old playbook of print ads and radio spots wasn’t working on the younger crowds who needed to hear the message, and public trust in any kind of government advertising was low. With budget committees watching every dime, Sarah needed a plan that was more than just impactful, it had to be ironclad from a fiscal standpoint.

The Initial Hurdle: Reaching a Skeptical Public

Sarah got the skepticism. “People see a government ad and often think ‘taxpayer money being spent on fluff’,” she said in a tense planning meeting. “We need to show them the value.” And she had the numbers to back it up. The GDPH’s last digital efforts were all static banner ads, and internal data from Q4 2024 showed a pathetic 0.18% click-through rate (CTR) for their health campaigns. That’s way below the 0.35% non-profit average cited in a 2025 eMarketer report. So her team pushed for video, which offered a much better way to convey a complex health message with real emotion. The pushback from the finance department was immediate and predictable. “Video ads are expensive,” the CFO said. “How do we justify that to taxpayers?” That was the real question: how could they spend more on a campaign while also proving they were being responsible with public funds and building trust at the same time?

Crafting a Data-Driven Video Strategy

Sarah knew she couldn’t just throw money at video and hope for the best. Her team started by digging into the data to build a real strategy. They defined their primary audience as adults aged 35-60, especially in underserved communities within Georgia’s Fulton, DeKalb, and Gwinnett counties. “Our first step was figuring out where these people actually watch video,” Sarah explained. “Internal GDPH survey data from early 2025 pointed us straight to short-form video on social and connected TV.” This meant focusing their efforts on platforms like YouTube, Meta Ads Manager for Reels, and various programmatic CTV services.

Their plan was to hit these platforms with two types of ads: quick, 15-second PSAs for social media scrolling and longer 30-second spots for the living room TV screen. To tackle the trust problem, they decided to feature real Georgians telling their own screening stories. It was about using community members, not actors, to build a genuine connection.

Precision Targeting and Budget Allocation

To satisfy the budget hawks, Sarah’s team got incredibly specific with their targeting. On social media, they didn’t just target by age. They layered on interests like “health and wellness” and “local community groups.” For CTV, they used geo-fencing to draw a digital box around specific zip codes with known low screening rates, like neighborhoods near the South Fulton Medical Center and parts of Norcross. This was about minimizing waste.

“We put 60% of the initial video budget into social media because of the lower cost-per-view and great targeting, with the other 40% going to CTV to get those high-completion views in living rooms,” Sarah said. They managed the money with an iron fist, setting strict daily and lifetime campaign budget caps so there was zero chance of overspending. They also planned a three-week pilot program in Augusta-Richmond County, giving them a chance to collect data and make fixes before they committed to a full statewide rollout.

Measuring Impact: Beyond Vanity Metrics

The GDPH team knew views were a vanity metric. To prove they were being responsible, they had to track what mattered. “We completely ignored simple impressions and clicks,” Sarah said. “We lived and died by our view-through rate (VTR), our cost-per-completion (CPC), and our actual conversion rates. For us, a conversion was a screening appointment booked or a call to our hotline.”

To do this, they hooked their ad platforms into Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to follow the user from the ad all the way to a form submission. They even used call tracking software to attribute every single call from the hotline number in the ads back to a specific video campaign. Sure, setting up that level of tracking took some initial investment, but it was the only way they could concretely demonstrate return on investment.

Here’s how it worked in practice: their first 15-second social media PSA in the Augusta pilot got a great VTR of 78% and a tiny $0.02 CPC. The problem? The conversion rate for actual appointments was a dismal 0.8%. The data showed them the call-to-action was just too vague. So they ran an A/B test with a new, blunt CTA, “Schedule Your Free Screening Today”, that sent people to a specific landing page. That one change pushed the conversion rate to 1.5%, almost doubling the efficiency of that ad.

Transparency as a Foundation of Public Trust

Sarah’s most effective move, however, was deciding to publish quarterly public reports on the campaign’s performance. “We made the call to share our results, good or bad, with everyone,” she explained. “It was about rebuilding trust, and accountability was just part of that.”

These reports, posted right on the GDPH website for anyone to see, broke down everything:

• Total ad spend per platform.
• Number of video views and unique viewers.
• Average view-through rate.
• Cost-per-completed-view.
• Number of attributed website visits and hotline calls.
• Number of actual screening appointments booked as a direct result of the campaign (anonymized, of course).

Putting this much data out there was unheard of at the GDPH, and not everyone was comfortable with it at first. But Sarah held her ground, arguing that with so much scrutiny on government spending, being proactive with transparency was the only path forward. As she put it, “We had to prove we were being fiscally responsible with accessible data, not just say it.”

The Outcome: Measurable Success and Renewed Trust

Eight months into the statewide campaign, by the end of 2026, the numbers spoke for themselves. The campaign had racked up over 12 million completed video views on social and CTV. Their average cost-per-completion landed at just $0.03, a bargain compared to the typical $0.05-$0.08 range for non-profit campaigns according to an IAB report. Best of all, they could directly attribute over 7,500 new cancer screening appointments to the ads, a 25% jump from the previous year, putting them well on their way to hitting their goal of reducing late-stage diagnoses.

Those public reports started to get noticed. Local news picked up the story, and the social media comments changed from cynical to supportive. “We started seeing comments like, ‘Finally, a government agency showing us where our money goes’,” Sarah recalled. “That’s when I knew we were rebuilding trust.” The GDPH’s work became the new playbook for other Georgia state agencies on how to run outreach that was both effective and accountable. It proved that video advertising, when you do it with precision and total transparency, is a powerful tool for any government agency.

For government agencies, fiscal responsibility in advertising means proving your value and earning public trust. It’s about using transparent, data-driven strategies to show a clear line from the dollars you spend to the results you deliver for the public.