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Mosquitoes vs sharks: Putting real health risks in context

The anti-mosquito campaign from the GatesNotes is smart and attention grabbing for three reasons: relevancy, brevity and use of data.

By on August 13, 2014

It’s easy to get people to worry about shark attacks, but getting them to focus on more likely causes of death is a bigger challenge. Bill Gates and his marketing team have come up with a smart way to do just that. Gates uses data to point out that instead of fearing death by shark, we should be much more worried about death by tsetse fly, snake, dog or even a fellow human. He notes:

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year. Mosquitoes kill 50,000 times as many people, but if there’s a TV channel that features Mosquito Week, I haven’t heard about it.

This mini-marketing campaign about the dangers of mosquitoes has 3 smart elements:

  1. It uses numbers and a simple graphic to illustrate real health risk.
  2. It capitalizes on not only Sharknado but Shark Week.
  3. It revives content from earlier this year – his original GatesNotes post is from April.

Now we need one of these for children’s health or obesity or diabetes that has the same pop culture relevance and hard info to help people understand what’s really going to kill them.