An innovative way of changing nutrition behaviour

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There were a lot of big learning curves during this study, some of which are hopefully of use to others working on intervention trials. Firstly, it is notoriously difficult to evaluate the impact of mass media interventions. In this case we chose a neighboring district to act as the control. It was the most similar area we could find that was not covered by the TV station yet it still proved quite different in its social-demographic characteristics, making the finding complicated to unravel. Secondly, exposure is the first critical ingredient to success. In our case we were working in a high urban area of East Java which there was a high level of media saturation and a lot of things competing for people’s attention. The exposure to our campaign was much lower than we had intended consequently making the effects much harder to measure. The need to keep it simple was our third big lesson. Our campaign was complex and involved various channels and touch-points. All interventions rely on human capacity and skill and so the more elements you add to a campaign the harder it is to maintain fidelity between villages and implement the intervention as intended.

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