NJSugarFreed Unhealthy Diet Campaign and ENDS Bot Detection and Development Project

The Public Good Projects (PGP) is a nonprofit organization that uses mass media messaging to address the nation’s greatest health problems. PGP brings together scientific health expertise with innovative approaches to messaging and marketing to improve population health by educating consumers and encouraging the adoption of healthy behaviors. PGP’s media campaigns are coordinated with on-the-ground community efforts, including organizational and/or local policy work, with the goal of creating healthier communities.

This project builds on NJSugarFreed, a previous project in which PGP carried out a statewide campaign to reduce sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption by New Jersey residents, with a particular focus on Medicaid recipients and Medicaid-eligible residents. The current project will grow and strengthen the efforts of NJSugarFreed by building capacity among current community partners, prioritizing new partnerships to focus on large corporations and hospitals, and building a repository of information based on PGP monitoring reports to support policy makers.

In a second component of this project, PGP is using its public health monitoring and cutting-edge robot (“bot”) detection technology to evaluate the prevalence of Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS, or e-cigarettes) bot networks, assess the content of their postings, and provide suggestions for countering bot messages. PGP is providing regular monitoring reports to partners, as well as building its own bot to share accurate and up-to-date public health messaging around ENDS. This project complements proposed work being conducted by the New Jersey Prevention Network (NJPN) through funding from the New Jersey Department of Health to target youth in a statewide health communication campaign targeting tobacco and e-cigarette use.

Learn more about The Public Good Projects.