To prove what works and what doesn’t in social marketing campaigns and platforms, consider how British epidemiologist Austin Bradford Hill fought tuberculosis in 1948.
Hill was determined to verify and demonstrate which medications and treatments worked and which were a waste of time to develop because they didn’t achieve the desired effect. He randomly assigned patients to both test and control groups — creating one of the first rigorous examples of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which proved causality of various treatments.