Social Vision Marketing and Design:
Social Vision Marketing and Design’s (SVMD) mission is to realize our client’s vision to its full potential through innovative marketing and design that communicates empowering ideas and ignites social change. For more information about Social Vision, visit www.yoursocialvision.com.
Desired Results:
The First Choice campaign seeks to increase utilization of the Early Test program and Partner Notification services. The goal of the Early Test program is to get high risk individuals to test for HIV, and for those who test positive, facilitate them into other programs including the Partner Notification services. The Partner Notification service seeks to assist HIV positive individuals in informing previous sexual partners about their possibility of HIV exposure.
Target Audience:
The First Choice campaign focuses its attention on subpopulations which have often times been overlooked and underserved. These subpopulations include, but are not limited to, individuals from the Bear, Leather, and Club going groups.
Desired Tone:
The overall tone of the campaign was determined with input from the various target populations. Social Vision’s goal was to produce a campaign that is edgy, sexy, and with a tone that will resonate with the onlooker.
Community Input:
During the months of November and December of 2008, campaign staff conducted multiple focus groups and key informant interviews with members of the campaign’s target populations. During these assessments, it became very clear that sex sells with these communities. It was stated that many gay men use the internet to cruise for sexual partners and to view pornography. Individuals who were questioned stated that many public health sites that they had visited were “boring” and that there was nothing on them that made them want to return. By merging sexually provocative photography with public health messaging, Social Vision is following the very basic element of marketing, find what your consumer wants and give it to them.
Marketing Strategy
The First Choice campaign is a multi media campaign that is promoted on billboards, bus shelters, pop-ups on Gay.com, and a campaign website. Focus groups and key informant interviews have stated that the HIV prevention field needs to start making our advertisements of services more sexy and edgy. Additionally, they have stated that we need to start working with popular gay based websites. Thus, the campaign is working in collaboration with Chi Chi La Rue’s Rascal Video.
As you can see within the websites start page, the campaign targets three gay communities, Bear, Leather, and Club. The idea is that people would select the website that they like best based upon their “First Choice”. From there, the rest of the look of the site would change based upon that selection.
Chi Chi La Rue has provided the campaign with some nude images that can only be viewed on the First Choice website with a special back door code which would be given out during outreach. Additionally, one of the images (non-nude) is highlighted every month on the home page.
During street outreach, outreach workers give out condom packs that contain a promotional card that would have one of the models (fully clothed), HIV testing information, website address, and a scratch off code. Initially, when a person visits the First Choice website, they would only see the fully clothed men on the home page. However, if they have one of the outreach cards with the scratch off, they would gain access to additional pages that would have the nude home page models. One of the biggest problems with conducting street outreach is getting people to take the outreach cards home. By having this scratch off, the idea is that people will go to the website only to use the code and see the nude models. The hope is that once people get to the website, they will see all the HIV info available and remember it in the future as a resource.
