‘Recognition of competition’ versus Will to App: rethinking digital engagement in Australian youth sexual health promotion policy and practice

Introduction

There is an inherent tension within ‘authoritative’ Australian digital sexual health promotion content – that is, content produced or commissioned by state and federal health organisations. While it is overtly ‘youth focused’, it has tended to avoid precisely the kinds of tone and content that young people prefer to access online (Byron, 2015a, 2015b; McKee et al., 2018). In addition, many such sources of sexual health information have tended to ignore or actively dismiss the role that friendship networks play in young people’s cultures of sexuality, sexual health and sexual learning (Byron, 2015a, 2017; McKee, 2017).

This tension is not exclusive to health communication but has much in common with the challenges facing digital news publishers and political activist organisations that have struggled in recent years to tread the line between signalling seriousness and authoritativeness via factual content, and producing clickbait in a quest to engage younger audiences. In this article, I build on the findings of a series of interrelated qualitative research projects conducted in Australia since 2012, in which approximately 100 key informants from the fields of sexuality education, sexual health promotion and public health were invited to reflect on the ways that young people’s digital cultures and practices are (or are not) understood within their organisational contexts (Albury, 2014; Albury and Byron, 2015, 2018). In doing so, I consider the ways that health educators and service providers producing digital sexual health promotion campaigns targeting young people might extend their practice through critical interdisciplinary engagement with popular social media content producers seeking to promote political or personal action.

These observations inform a reflection on the increasing policy incentives to ‘go digital’, which have, in some cases, resulted in a tendency towards the ‘Will to App’ – that is, a drive to create a walled garden of content that is corralled away from broader social media ecosystems (Albury et al., 2019; McKee et al., 2018). This tendency can lead government and non-government organisations to invest considerable amounts of time and money in apps and platforms that may simply replicate ‘legacy’ forms of health promotion material (such as brochures and billboards), as opposed to fully engaging with the affordances offered by contemporary digital technologies and the cultures of use. While initiatives shaped by the ‘Will to App’ may specifically seek to target youth markets, I note that they often fail to meet the best-practice standards for social marketing campaigns, in that they fail to recognise existing youth-focused media platforms as legitimate sources of information (Byron, 2015b).

In contrast to the ‘Will to App’ model of health promotion, this article offers some possible alternative modes of digitising sexual health information and service provision cultures. Rather than analysing or critiquing digital content produced by government, not-for-profit or commercial health promotion organisations, it draws instead on a selection of case studies of sexual health and well-being-focused content offered by popular entertainment-focused social news platforms including Vice and Buzzfeed. It also presents an overview of the work of journalist and digital media educator Amy O’Leary, whose ‘storytelling-meets-analytics’ approach to digital journalism practice might be productively translated and applied within Australian health promotion contexts. While a detailed analysis of the parallels and disconnects between digital journalism industries and health communication organisations is beyond the scope of this article, I draw on O’Leary’s public reflections on successful approaches to digital journalism in order to offer a series of provocations to contemporary Australian health communication practice. These examples are not intended to be prescriptive, but are offered as a thought exercise (with caveats) for government and non-government sexual health communicators and service providers seeking to build capacity in the field of digital youth engagement.

The Will to App in digital sexual health promotion

Recent Australian studies have found that Australian young people express a strong preference for, and tend to trust, sexual health information that is produced by authoritative sources (e.g. government websites), but also display a preference for ‘vulgar’ or vernacular sources of information, and are more likely to share material that is funny and/or features intimate first-person narratives (Cohn and Richters, 2013; Evers et al., 2013; McKee et al., 2014b, 2018). However, Australian organisations seeking to provide accessible sexual health information to young people currently face significant challenges that restrict their ability to create this kind of content. First, they must confront the long-standing conservative criticism of sexuality education, which argues that the provision of factual information regarding issues such as contraception and sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention encourages ‘promiscuity’ among young people. Furthermore, they must pass an (unofficial) tabloid media test – that is, the Health Minister or Chief Executive Officer responsible for the organisation must be prepared to defend media criticism of sex education and sexual health promotion campaigns.

The ongoing politicisation of the Safe Schools anti-bullying programme (which was reframed by conservative activists as ‘radical sex education’) has rendered the provision of youth-focused information that critically engages with gender and sexual identity/orientation particularly ‘sensitive’ and ‘controversial’ in the contemporary Australian context (see Law, 2017; Rhodes et al., 2016). In the face of these perceived risks, the Will to App indicates a desire to create a bounded digital environment that functions as a ‘walled garden’ in which both staff and client participation can be monitored or controlled (see McKee et al., 2018).

In addition, individuals and organisations working with young people in the field of sexual health may face a range of institutional or systemic barriers when they seek to create digital content or engage with young peoples’ informal digital practices. These barriers range from a lack of resourcing and access to appropriate technologies, to a lack of staff training in the field of media and communication, a general lack of digital literacy, or an absence of relevant theoretical and methodological frameworks at the level of organisational policy and practice. Where one or more of these barriers are present, neither individuals nor broader policy development frameworks are able to fully understand, or adapt to, the speed at which young people’s use of digital devices, platforms and technologies are evolving, leading to confusion regarding ‘best practice’ (Livingstone and Mason, 2015).

Many Australian health organisations have developed (and maintained) dynamic digital campaigns and resources that do not follow the Will to App tendency towards the creation of ‘walled gardens’. For example, ACON Health (formerly the AIDS Council of New South Wales) has expanded its recent campaigns and services across a range of digital platforms including niche social marketing campaigns targeting specific groups (such as older gay men, or same-sex attracted women who want to quit smoking) across social media platforms, and one-to-one peer outreach via in-app chat on gay men’s cruising/hook-up apps. This is not surprising. As Brown et al. (2014) observe, Australian Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) health promotion campaigns have, since the 1980s, foregrounded the need to recognise gay men’s collective ‘intimate and cultural practices, not just [individual] behaviour’ – and indeed this affirmation of the social and cultural context in which sexual behaviours take place is widely considered to be a key strength of the Australian response to HIV (p. 37).

In contrast, state and federal ‘youth-focused’ campaigns have tended to adopt a broader brush approach in terms of both content and messaging (see Byron, 2015a, 2015b). This ‘broader brush’ partly relates to the relative size and scope of the respective target groups (e.g. all Australian young people aged 12–30; or all gay men aged above 18 and residing in New South Wales (NSW)). However, my experience of participant observation in the space of health promotion policy suggest that the more culturally appropriate and contextually sensitive approach adopted by ACON reflects a different sense of institutional obligation to end users of health promotion content and health services.

Adult members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTQ) community are not only ‘clients’ or ‘targets’ for health services – they have recognised authority as public servants, politicians, activists and lobbyists (see Brown et al., 2014; Sendziuk, 2003). In contrast, while young people are central to advisory groups or participatory design consultations for many Australian health organisations (see Hagen et al., 2012), they are not party to decision-making processes that determine sexual health promotion policy, funding and service priorities. Consequently, young people are seldom in a position to drive policy regarding the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of social marketing campaigns and associated health promotion activities that target them, either at a centralised (i.e. state or federal) policy level, or in the more diffuse and decentralised spaces in which policy is put into practice.

As Hendry et al. (2018) observe (pp. 8–9), Australian sexual health policy has tended to reductively define young people aged 12–30 as ‘at risk’, emphasising developmental ‘deficits’, while overlooking or erasing the cultural, environmental and economic enablers and barriers to health access that diverse groups of Australian young people might confront. Significantly, there is little attention paid in sexual health policy to the specific sexual health information and service provision needs of young adults in their late teens and twenties, who may be working and living independently, and no longer engaged with formal educational settings (Hendry et al., 2018: 9–10). Where organisations like ACON have produced social media campaigns and resources targeting specific sub-groups (e.g. sexually adventurous gay men as opposed to younger men who are just beginning to explore their sexuality), sexual health promotion resources targeting young people have been scoped in ways that limit their competitiveness within social media’s attention economies. This approach echoes Ariadne Vromen’s (2017: 55) observations of the ways that ‘government and parties … NGOs and social movement organisations’ have, until recently, sought to involve young people in political campaigns primarily through ‘one-way information broadcast relationships’ as opposed to promoting dialogic relationships via social media ecosystems.

‘Recognition of competition’ or how can sexual health services compete with Vice?

Many projects within the field of Australian sexual health promotion are informed by social marketing principles. According to the International Social Marketing Association, the disciplinary field ‘seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviours that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good’ (cited in Lee and Kotler, 2016: 9). Lee and Kotler (2016: 8–11) note that work in this field of marketing can be challenging, in that social marketing practitioners are often called to promote actions that are not especially pleasurable or rewarding in the short term, but prevent future health issues (such as promoting the use of sunscreen to prevent future skin cancers). While social marketing has some similarities with associated fields such as education, behavioural psychology, behavioural economics and ‘nudge’ marketing, it has four ‘best-practice’ characteristics:

As Lee and Kotler note, all four of these characteristics need not be present in all social marketing campaigns, and I focus here on the challenges emerging on questions of competition and sustainability. A growing body of Australian research has found that young people are not always receptive to the kinds of sexual health promotion content traditionally favoured by government and non-government organisations (Byron et al., 2013; Evers et al., 2013; McKee, 2017). Recent studies suggest that the language used in official messaging may be deemed by young people to be too clinical or ‘scientific’ (Cohn and Richters, 2013; McKee et al., 2014a), and that earnest slogans and associated sexual health campaign content may be perceived as embarrassing, stigmatising or simply tone-deaf (Byron et al., 2013; Evers et al., 2013). This literature does not argue that young people are uniformly opposed to accessing (and importantly, sharing) sexual health information via social media platforms; rather, it suggests that such information must reflect young people’s interests and priorities – including their desire to ensure that when they seek out sexual information for the purposes of health, identity formation or curiosity, these activities are not visible to others, such as peers, teachers and parents. Finally, it is clear that young people express a preference for sexual health information sources that acknowledge the importance of intimate friendship networks (Byron, 2015a; McKee, 2017), and feature a narrative focus on ‘real life stories’ (i.e. empathetic storytelling) and humour (Burgess et al., 2018; Byron et al., 2013; Evers et al., 2013; McKee et al., 2014b). These are some of the same elements that are seen to enhance ‘spreadability’ in other forms of digital communication (Jenkins et al., 2013).

As McKee (2017) observes, popular media producers already deploy these strategies – particularly on platforms such as Buzzfeed and Junkee, which aim to create highly shareable content. For example, Buzzfeed’s Director of Development, Ashly Perez, strives to create videos that tell ‘personal’ stories that are shared because audiences identify with them and sharing causes them to feel ‘less alone’ (Stott, 2017). While examples of Perez’s content focuses on the intersection of sexual identity and ethnicity as opposed to sexual health, young audiences seeking sexual health information online are not lacking access to entertaining, engaging sources of factual ‘social news’ focused on sex and sexuality.

Sources of popular or vernacular sexual health content include Vice and its sister website Broadly, which feature explicit and often raunchy stories that offer lively and factually accurate sexual health information. For example, in the Broadly article ‘How to have the gentle sex the doctor ordered’ (promoted via social media with the tagline ‘Rough sex has a superiority complex and it needs to chill’), US journalist Rachel McCarthy James (2016) undertakes a detailed exploration of what ‘vigorous sex’ might mean to various medical professionals. The article interrogates the ‘linguistic and cultural barriers’ to clear guidelines around sexual practice, and offers expert advice for women who are recovering from pelvic surgery or experiencing chronic health conditions and seeking to enjoy sex, but minimise pain.

Citing representatives of organisations such as The Centre for Pelvic Pain and Sexual Health at the University of Kansas Medical Centre, and linking to a scholarly article in the journal Sexuality and Disability, the Broadly article does not dumb down health information in order to engage with a ‘youth’ market. On the contrary, it deploys the tags ‘sex, health, non-vigorous sex, vaginismus, vulvodynia’, allowing readers to connect to similarly themed articles on the Vice and Broadly sites, some entertaining and vulgar, others more ‘issue’ based. For example, readers who click the ‘sex’ tag are rewarded with sex and drug focused headlines such as ‘From Schlong Bong to Weed Lube: I tried all the Weed products designed for Sex’ and ‘Inside a BDSM Sex Dungeon with a Hillary Dom and a Guilty Diaper-clad Trump Voter’. Those who click the ‘health’ tag can access a range of stories focused on sexual health, including an investigation into why young men are (or are not) seeking access to Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccines.

Vice and Broadly’s parent company Vice Media has been rapidly expanding since 2014, and sees itself not only as a competitor to digital entertainment/news services such as Buzzfeed, but as a broadcast news and documentary producer on par with Cable News Network (CNN) (Yakowicz, 2014). Like local government and non-government based sexual health promotion and social marketing services, it identifies 18–35-year-olds as a target market. Unlike local health promoters and service providers it is extremely well resourced (recently estimated to be worth US$5.7 billion), and can draw on the work of journalists, content producers and technical staff in over 36 countries (Lieberman, 2017). Most importantly, Vice and Broadly content is not government subsidised and does not need to provide sex or drug information in accordance with state polices, criminal laws or other regulatory frameworks.

In addition to competing with professionally produced material such as that found in Broadly, formal sexual health services must compete as sources of ‘expert knowledge’ in an information marketplace that includes ‘wellness’ celebrities who promote goods and services relating to sex and sexuality (such as Gwyneth Paltrow) and microcelebrities ranging from YouTube sex advisers to Instagram ‘influencers’ (see Abidin, 2017; Gunter, 2017; Hess, 2016). In addition, a range of recent research with LGBTQ young people in Australia and elsewhere points to a well-established peer-to-peer culture circulating advice and associated content relating to intersectional approaches to sexual health, sexual practices, respectful relationships, sex/gender identity, mental health, disability and cultural identity via social media platforms such as Tumblr and YouTube (see Byron and Hunt, 2017; Southerton and Rasmussen, 2018; Vivienne, 2017).

As McKee (2017) notes, there is an established tradition of sexuality health educators collaborating with entertainment producers to create what might be termed ‘native social marketing’ content, also known as Entertainment Education. In his review of the research literature, McKee (2017: 30) notes, however, that where researchers and health promotion staff report on partnerships with commercial entertainment producers, they tend to imply that they are there to undertake a one-way process of educating and informing entertainment producers, rather than engaging in a reciprocal learning process that might improve health research and practice. Like McKee, I suggest this lack of reciprocity wastes a valuable opportunity for capacity building for sexual health professionals, particularly given that social media content produced by formal sexual health campaigns are competing for attention with highly successful professional and semi-professional entertainment content. With this point in mind, what kinds of strategies might be most productive for organisations seeking to attract and sustain engagement with their audiences? An overview of long-time journalist and editor Amy O’Leary’s reflections on her work at The New York Times and ‘feel-good’ social media platform Upworthy presents a speculative vision of how and where digital sexual health promotion and social marketing might evolve beyond the Will to App. This vision is tempered by a reflection on the limitations of the ‘activist analytic’ model favoured by Upworthy (Karpf, 2016).

Engagement = storytelling plus data?

Upworthy is perhaps best known for popularising the ‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next’ headline genre, also known as clickbait. The site originally operated as a curator, repackaging pre-existing content with the now notorious clickbait headlines. In 2015, the site undertook a significant re-branding exercise, abandoning clickbait (with profuse apologies) and hiring The New York Times Deputy International Editor, Amy O’Leary as Chief Story Officer (i.e. editorial director). ¹

In offering a case study of O’Leary’s approach to digital communication, this article does not seek to offer a prescription, or suggest that her model of content production would be the best roadmap for future youth digital sexual health promotion and social marketing practice. Rather, it presents O’Leary’s strategies as a valuable speculative vision for rethinking and redesigning professional health communication culture, which is particularly relevant given Upworthy’s success in promoting content focused on social justice issues. It should be noted that O’Leary is not the only successful digital media producer to have shared their editorial decision-making processes. Editors and content producers from social news platforms such as Junkee and Buzzfeed have discussed their practices in industry conferences, and detailed interviews for technology trade press (e.g. Mordechai, 2012; Shepherd, 2014).

However, O’Leary’s public explanations of her approach differ from these accounts. Like others in the field, she espouses standard digital publication strategies (such as A/B or ‘two-sample’ testing that offers two alternative images and headlines to audiences in order to rapidly evaluate content in terms of clickthroughs and shareability) that have their origins in disciplines such as behavioural psychology. However, while O’Leary champions attention to metrics as technical feedback mechanisms for content producers, she explicitly promotes humanities-inflected frameworks drawn from the disciplines of anthropology, history and literary studies as key tools for understanding the role of emotion and narrative in digital publishing (Kraft, 2016). In addition, as an ex-staffer of the long-running documentary radio programme This American Life, and co-author of The New York Times’ Innovation Report (see Abbruzzese, 2014), O’Leary offers a perspective on ‘viral’ digital content production that is deeply embedded in the craft of journalistic storytelling (as opposed to advertising or marketing).

O’Leary’s professional biography, as documented in her published interviews and conference presentations, offers an instructive example of the ways that individuals and organisations that traditionally focused on the delivery of engaging and authoritative information in a tightly controlled and edited print-based form can adapt to digital environments. In a 2015 interview with Caroline O’Donovan of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, O’Leary reflected on her 8 years at The New York Times, and the slow integration of digital culture into editorial policy and journalism practice. O’Leary’s account of cultural change she witnessed at The Times presents an interesting parallel with the current status of ‘the digital’ in Australian youth health promotion:

In 2007, as digital people, we were expected to be 100 percent deferent to all traditional processes. We weren’t to bother reporters or encourage them to operate differently at all, because what they were doing was the very core of our journalism.

That was a really different conversation than today, when we work with all kinds of reporters and editors who are thinking really proactively about, ‘How do we tell the story differently? What do we livetweet? What do we do in a liveblog? What kinds of digital storytelling would work best for this?’

In many cases you’ve got reporters and editors who have more ideas than the Times can even possibly produce online. The nature of the conversation has completely changed. (O’Leary in O’Donovan, 2015)

While journalism is clearly not equivalent to health promotion (or the provision of clinical and other health services), the separation of ‘the editorial work’ and ‘the digital work’ outlined in O’Leary’s recollection of her early years at The Times has resonance with the contemporary sphere of sexual health promotion, where health professionals are often quite unsure of how or why they can best utilise digital media in workplace contexts (Albury and Byron, 2015). In this context, ‘the digital’ is implicitly framed as a separate sphere to ‘traditional’ sexual health promotion and clinical service provision. How then might ‘the nature of the conversation’ about health communications change?

As O’Leary observed in a 2014 presentation on challenges to journalism, contemporary news media operates in a space where ‘content is infinite. But attention remains finite’. Furthermore, most information reaches young audiences and consumers via diverse and personalised social media newsfeeds, where formal or ‘expert’ information sources compete with playful exchanges with friends, cat gifs and high-profile reportage of global crises. In this context, O’Leary (2014) argues, journalists ‘cannot control the feed’ – though they can, as she put it, ‘seed the feed’ with rich content deploying ‘surprise, characters and strong narrative textures’.

Explaining her motivations for moving from the Times to Upworthy in terms of new potentials for visualising and customising the process of digital communication via narrative storytelling, O’Leary provided insights into new ways of approaching key challenges for engagement-driven social marketing: recognition of competition and sustainability. These insights include the rich approach to narrative storytelling suggested above, complemented and informed by ‘deep dives’ into data. Upworthy’s data analytics allow journalists and editors to track factors including the audience for a specific story, the device on which it is viewed, and the reader’s habits when reading and sharing – and, as O’Leary notes, this is not uncommon practice in digital journalism. The data analysis process goes further, however, by mapping these data onto the genre and narrative structure of the content itself, allowing journalists and editors a deeper insight into why particular kinds of content – for example, emotive first-person stories of resilience, versus ‘relatable’ comic tales of sexual misadventure, versus listicles illustrated with Disney gifs – are read, watched or shared (or not) by particular audiences in particular contexts (O’Leary, 2015).

Upworthy moved into new territory again by cross-mapping these factors onto the narrative structures of specific articles – for example, in a much-cited example of effective ‘empathetic storytelling’, O’Leary (2015) explores the analytics conducted on a successful 5000-word story on labour practices in US fast-food chains entitled: ‘Five incredibly delicious fast-food chains you should never, ever eat at – and one you should, but can’t’. As Nieman correspondent Eric Lichterman (2015) observes, Upworthy reporter Eric March’s story is ‘unrelenting’ in its use of comedy to provoke reader dismay and outrage over fast-food working conditions, and with 65 jokes in 5000 words it attracted over 2 million unique viewers. As with the Vice story outlined above, this example suggests strategies that could be translated into the context of sexual health promotion to engage audiences in nuanced ‘longreads’ that provide substantial amounts of both factual information and entertainment content. Similarly, Vromen’s (2017) analysis of digital activist organisation GetUp’s ‘campaign storytelling’ strategies points to the success of emotive storytelling as a means of engagement with youth audiences, in order to create a sense of shared community or collective solidarity that can be mobilised to action through ‘moral urgency’ to create social change.

Implications for digital sexual health policy and practice

As I have suggested, the Will to App’s tendency towards tightly bounded, static digital content is prompted in part by the difficulty of evaluating more dialogic or vernacular forms of digital communication. Taking these brief case studies of Vice and Upworthy as a point of departure, the question arises as to what kinds of sexual health campaign evaluations might be possible if health promotion organisations were resourced to develop (or adapt) digital tools that were embedded within users’ current digital cultures? What if young people’s digital engagement with sexual health information could be tracked and documented via ‘deep-dive’ data analytics that offer immediate feedback and incentives for communicating sexual health information via humour, ‘vulgarity’ and empathetic narrative storytelling techniques?

While the granular details of Upworthy’s data analytics are not public, O’Leary and her colleagues have shared a range of insights into the ways such tools might be applied to promote sexual health information, and evaluate its effectiveness in terms of audience engagement. For example, O’Leary has revealed that editors and writers follow ‘up to eight different data factors per story’, including (but not limited to) standard analytics including clicks, shares and time spent on the page (Kraft, 2016). Upworthy also conducts ‘user experience’ testing on their stories, including pre- and post-surveys designed by an in-house social psychologist that invite readers to share attitudes and opinions on particular issues, and then reflect on their immediate responses and whether their opinions have changed (Martin, 2016).

Deployment of similar digital tools would allow health communicators to develop more holistic or immersive social media strategies that extend beyond pre- and-post-campaign evaluations assessing users’ intention to use condoms or attend a clinic for STI testing. While these are important measures, they do not allow organisations and individuals to refine their communicative practices during the communication process. In addition to counting the volume of traffic, clicks and shares during an active campaign, organisations might also deploy data analytics to cross-match this information with data that assisted staff in learning how to better craft and refine storytelling practices, or to provide evidence-based rationales that allowed staff to revise messaging that clearly does not resonate with the target audience.

Furthermore, sexual health policymakers could fund programmes that seek to build internal capacity in terms of understanding and/or deploying digital communication strategies and techniques at all levels within sexual health organisations. These programmes might allow Australian organisations to emulate The New York Times’ transition from a divided ‘journalism over here, digital over there’ workplace to a space in which all staff members (from clinical staff, to health promotion staff to researchers and management boards) were able to play an active role in engaging with young people (and older clients) via online and mobile media.

While this approach gestures towards solving sustainability issues within organisations that currently rely on short term, project-based funding to support digital engagements, it is not without its own challenges and limitations. As Mowlabocus et al. (2015) have observed, the technical properties of social media platforms mean that otherwise ‘private’ conversations about sensitive health issues can be easily recorded, copied and archived beyond the original setting and context. Furthermore, ‘real name’ policies on popular platforms like Facebook can present issues for health workers who seek to maintain boundaries between personal and professional communication on social platforms. These factors can lead to increased vulnerability for health promotion staff and clients alike. In addition, the capacity to record, track and aggregate data associated with digital engagement raises substantial ethical issues in the field of health, where data breaches can result in significant harms for vulnerable populations (Lupton, 2015; Zook et al., 2017). I suggest that the potential offered by the case studies outlined above can only be successfully and ethically adopted within a sexual health context in which both health professionals and health consumers are able to cultivate and deploy digital literacies that allow them to make informed choices in relation to their own generation of data (McCosker, 2017).

Finally, it is not simply the case that organisations like Vice and Upworthy are better resourced than Australian sexual health organisations – there are also significant issues of scale at play in terms of audience. As Karpf (2016) notes in his study of Upworthy, digital engagement optimisation strategies such as A/B testing are subject to ‘boundary conditions’ that limit their effectiveness beyond specific circumstances. Karpf (2016) defines these boundaries in terms of a theoretical ‘analytic floor’, which represents the need for organisations to have a sufficiently large audience (and volume of data) in place before practices such as A/B testing become meaningful (p. 129). He also theorises the existence of an ‘analytics frontier’ which he defines as ‘the types of movement activity and strategic goals that are either too complex or too ephemeral to be measured by the most commonly used digital metrics and indicators’ (Karpf, 2016: 134).

While it should be noted that Australian digital entertainment publishers such as Junkee certainly deploy analytics such as attention tracking and A/B testing, the Australian market overall (and the youth market as a sub-category of this market) is subject to significantly different boundary conditions than either Vice or Upworthy. Youth sexual health promotion organisations are addressing a comparatively small audience to begin with. If they choose to develop digital communications strategies that depart from the ‘broad brush’ approach and target sub-communities, they will simultaneously reduce the size of their audiences, making their digital analytics strategies less meaningful. For this reason, this article should not be read as a call to subsume the Will to App within a Will to Analytics. On the contrary, organisations that adopt an instrumentalist approach to social media communication that is driven solely by metrics may be hamstrung by the expense, insensitivity or imprecision of the analytic measures available to them.

Conclusion

Just as it is easier to measure the distribution of a hard-copy brochure than to undertake ongoing community outreach, it may (in some cases) seem easy to measure clicks and downloads of discrete digital products rather than engage with target audiences within the messy space of social media. How then, does digitisation assist (or undermine) youth-focused organisations that seek to promote cultures of engagement and participation around sexual health? O’Leary’s account of her work at The New York Times and Upworthy suggests that an organisation-wide approach to reimagining sexual health communication might be possible, and that such an approach might open up new possibilities for developing appealing social media content targeting young adult audiences. The Upworthy model of analytics promises a means of measuring these intangibles in ways that extend beyond a tally of clicks, likes, referrals and shares. However, an experiment with a more granular data analytics process inherently requires researchers and health organisations alike to attend to the ethical issues associated with data collection and data retention, as well as a consideration of the limitations of the digital floor and digital frontiers evoked by Karpf. Furthermore, a shift in organisational approaches to ‘the digital’ requires a prior shift in policy and resourcing to support capacity building and cultural change in sexual health promotion and clinical service providers.

As I have suggested, Junkee, Buzzfeed, Vice and Upworthy are built on very different business models to sexual health organisations. These commercial, entertainment-focused platforms have far greater freedom to adopt the ‘fail early, fail often’ ethos of digital start-up culture, and thus are able to undertake deliberately ‘risky’ experiments in terms of the crafting and dissemination of content. Significantly, these organisations are predicated on ‘storytelling’ as opposed to ‘messaging’ – while they draw on disciplines such as social psychology in the editorial strategy, their content producers have emerged from more humanities-aligned training grounds, such as narrative and documentary filmmaking, creative arts and journalism. Even with all these tools at their disposal, they are still vulnerable to significant fluctuations in audience reach and engagement when platforms such as Facebook and YouTube adjust their algorithms to favour different content genres.

With this in mind, it may be more prudent for Australian sexual health promoters to simply partner with local digital platforms such as Junkee or Buzzfeed Australia that already commit their resources to working with social platforms in order to ‘do’ engagement well – indeed, a recent Western Australia Health campaign has taken this approach (Callander, 2017). However, this outsourcing model will not build internal capacity within existing sexual health promotion cultures, and does not offer senior policymakers much incentive to move beyond funding models that incite the Will to App. Consequently, in this article, I have tried to scope an alternative vision for youth sexual health promotion policy and practice that takes account not only of what current research tells us about young people’s information-seeking practices and preferences, but also seeks to develop and extend current Australian sexual health promotion policy and practice in respect to digital communication.