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Governments and healthcare organizations spend over 30 billion dollars each year on promotional campaigns meant to encourage long-lasting, positive changes to health-related behavior. As such, understanding what makes health communications effective is an important aspect of improving public health. Past health promotion campaigns have sometimes failed to create enduring change to attitudes and behavior or have even backfired by increasing unhealthy behaviors. Research indicates that these inconsistencies are partly the result of a one-size-fits-all approach to health communication, as opposed to one in which features of the message, source, and/or setting are “matched” or “tailored” to their recipients in some way. Imagine Katie–a mother of two who smokes cigarettes daily. Exposed to a promotional campaign attempting to persuade smokers to quit, Katie would likely be more influenced by a message that highlights her role as a parent to keep her children healthy (matching her parental values) than a message that lacks personal relevance such as one about her role as a member of society that emphasizes the costs of smoking to the healthcare system (mismatching). The success of matched messages often derives from the fact that they increase processing of the message and its arguments, which tends to produce stronger attitudes that persist over time and impact behavior (Teeny et al., 2021). However, research suggests that matching, like other seemingly positive variables, is not always effective or consequential. The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) helps explain how strategies like matching work (and don’t work) under …