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Partnering with the Media to Address HIV/AIDS

Presenter discusses using partners to reach target audience.   Presenter discusses using partners to reach target audience.

Date Released: 5/6/2008
Running time: 16:50
Author: National Center for Health Marketing (NCHM)
Series Name: Health Communication, Marketing & Media Conference

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[Announcer] This podcast is presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC – safer, healthier people.

[Leslie Snyder] Our next presenter is Tina Hoff and Tina’s a Vice President at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is a non-profit operating foundation based in Menlo Park, California - hold the applause - with a focus on health issues, and the foundation has no affiliation with Kaiser Permanente. Tina’s been with Kaiser Foundation for ten years during which she’s helped create and develop the entertainment media partnership program, which she today runs and her program builds partnerships with leading media companies in the U.S. and abroad to address pressing public health issues, notably HIV/AIDS.

[Tina Hoff] Thank you all. So Leslie actually did a nice setup for my first slide. I just wanted to give a few words of introduction about who we are because we’re a little bit of a different organization and probably not like any other foundation that you know. We are an operating organization, which means we run and develop our own programs. Our interest is in health issues. Most of that work is focused domestically. We do work on the major health policy concerns, as well as looking at public health issues like HIV/AIDS. We also, in the area of AIDS, do work internationally, particularly in our work with media and that relates to the program that I’m going to talk to you a bit about today. So I think I was really happy to have Melissa go first because I think her theoretical framework is a good setup for what I’m going to talk to you about, which is really more of sort of how we apply some of that kind of thinking to an execution into the programs that we run with media.

So to start off, I wanted to first talk a little bit about what makes an effective media campaign. Now, while our issue of interest is AIDS specifically in this work, I think this model applies to any social or health issue that you might be doing, and also, sort of echoing some of the points that Melissa made, sort of number one starting point is determining your audience. Thinking about who you want to reach, is the media an effective way to reach them, can it have an impact? Next, from our perspective, is finding a partner that can help you reach that audience, and so you’ll hear a lot about partnerships in my presentation. We seek out media partners who have a connection to the audiences we want to reach and then work together with them to create targeted messages that are going to reach that audience. So we’re very narrow focused in the kinds of campaigns that we’re developing. Another important element is that we take a multi-platform approach and that means we don’t rely on one communication strategy. We use basically any of the assets our media partner has to bear and use that for the campaign and I’m going to talk more about that later on in the presentation. Another key element is that we link all of our on-air programming to back-end resources. So the goal of the on-air is to get people to get more information, connect them with services. We do that by connecting up with the CDC. All of our campaigns drive to their hotlines, as well as to other information resources that we create for those audiences, and then, of course, there is ongoing monitoring an assessing - making sure that we’re on track, making sure that we’re getting the distribution first, and that the message is having an impact on our audience, as well. The partners that we work with in the U.S. today include many of the top media companies. You can see the logos of some of them up there. These are our current partnerships. Most of those campaigns are either HIV focused or have a heavy HIV component. Some include a little bit broader sexual health content, in the case of MTV. We also are working internationally under an initiative called the Global Media AIDS initiative, which was a U.N.-supported effort that we helped develop to basically mobilize media around the world in hard hit places to get media more involved in communication outreach around AIDS and we’re working in Russia, India, the Caribbean, and Africa are our primary regions of interest we’re starting to develop some work in; Asia as well. MTV is international is also a long time partner of ours. Before I go into more detail on what our model looks like and how our campaigns run, I thought it would be good to show you some of this work and then you’d have that context as we go, so really testing my media savvy I’ve got to switch to video, so if you can bear with me for a second.

Audio from video… On June 5, 1981 the first AIDS case was reported in the United States and twenty-five years later your generation has never known life without it. This is an exciting project. HBO, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and BVDO Worldwide have made a commitment by launching a set of T.V. and radio public service ads featuring high profile African Americans. Ill infections could potentially be reduced by proper education; that’s where the media comes in. You need to reach people and you need to educate them and so this is an extraordinarily important initiative in our view because it provides information about HIV/AIDS on some of the most important airways. That to me is the important thing that we needed to do. It was unique in many ways to what we can offer. HIV/AIDS has to become part of our business world. It’s like a start collaboration between Carribean broadcasters and major international partners. It’s a major step forward. The new five day media campaign is financed by the Bill and Olivia Gates Foundation, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and the Coca-Cola African Foundation. Imagine the possibility of an HIV free generation; it begins with you. I’m going to wear a condom every time I have sex, no matter who I’m with, where I’m at, or what time of day it is because that is the only way to be totally safe. Good. Heroes change the world. Twenty-five heroes, twenty-five years too long. Make AIDS history. We’re dedicating the entire show to the real deal on how to keep yourself in the know, how to stay protected, and how to be healthy. I’m HIV positive and I’ve never personally sat across or even known someone who had HIV. The most common misconception about HIV is that it has a look.; that you can look at someone and tell they’re HIV positive. My first boyfriend and I didn’t use condoms and I contracted HIV. You’re going to have to do some things differently if you decide to do something. And how did your wife contract the disease? Like it makes a difference? I mean what are you going to do, decide if you should feel sorry for them or not? Here’s my video so that you can see what it’s like to be young and infected by HIV. We’re not in here [inaudible]. [Inaudible]. Now whether or not a man will sleep with another man or another woman, condoms must be used. Forty-eight hours [inaudible] themed on HIV and AIDS. A full twenty-five years… Twenty-five years ago… Twenty-five years… [Inaudible] to pass along [inaudible] affected by this disease. Giving yourself a minute to think could help you make a better decision. He said sit down and I said no and he said, mom I’m HIV positive, and at that moment I just didn’t know what to think or what to say. I was a well-educated person who knew the risk of HIV and I caught it. I never thought HIV could happen to me. I had never heard of another HIV positive heterosexual woman and I just didn’t think I was at risk.

It just goes back to the presentation. Great. So, on the reel, hopefully you saw, got a little bit of a flavor of the way that we work with media, the different kinds of approaches that we use to getting out messages. The core elements of our campaign are here on the screen right now. I’m going to talk about each of these in a little bit more detail. I think the other important message hopefully you took out of that video presentation is that, in addition to the direct work we do with media to get messaging out to our audience, we’re also really trying to change the media, culture and media involvement as partners in communication around health issues.

So, I’m going to go through these pretty quickly and then take questions afterwards. Targeted public service ads are a part of most of our campaigns. Again, sort of what kind of distinguishes what we do is, we try and do PSA’s that don’t look like PSA’s. We use them to drive and promote back-end resources primarily, so they’re really promotions to get people to get more information, which leads to our call to action. We also use long form programming and that includes everything from getting messages into existing popular entertainment, as well as other public affairs and news programming. Also developing original shows with some of our partners, particularly with MTV and BET we’ve developed a number of shows - hour-long documentaries, live audience shows, that sort of thing, to reinforce some of the issues we’re talking about. Internationally, we also provide project grants to help local broadcasters develop their own local programming. Information and referral service are a big part of what we do, really sort of behind the scenes, but sort of the most crucial part of the campaign, I think. We offer toll free hotlines that include answers to frequently asked questions, they redirect you to the CDC or Planned Parenthood if you want to connect to services or get more information. We have extensive web resources and sites that we’ve developed with all our partners, which are really almost parallel campaigns to what’s on-air. We’re increasingly getting into the realm of SMS text messaging using mobile technology and other of the popular handheld platforms to try and get messaging out. We actually piloted a text messaging campaign using the CDC’s database this past spring. So you could text in your zip code and get back the closest testing center to you; we’re starting to expand that. When possible, we try and link what we’re doing on-air to events on the ground. A number of our partners, notably BET, has a very effective on the ground initiative that complements our on-air campaign with them which is called Wrap It Up. They’re on college campuses, they work with state health departments, they often do mobile testing units that have been hugely popular. Their brand brings people in and they’ll incorporate their talent, our information resources are there and they’re working with the local service providers. We’re doing a lot of activities to try and engage our audience in our programming so a buzz word called User Generated Content that you’ve probably all begun to hear is a big part of how our programming is shaping up - asking the audience to be part of developing the content and even creating that. We did our first entirely user-generated show with MTV last year that had young people talking about what AIDS means to them as a generation that’s never known a time without it. Informing and assessing, to sort of close out, of course is critical. We do this in a number of different ways and there’re sort of two areas of measurement that I think Melissa touched on too. First, you’ve got to make sure your message is out there and being seen by the audience you’re trying to reach. Otherwise, measuring impact doesn’t mean a lot if nobody ever saw your message. So we spend a lot of time making sure that our messaging is getting out, it’s getting placed during periods when the people we want to reach will see it, and refining that and working with our media partners to really target that. We do national random sample surveys and focus groups and others for the traditional research techniques to try and assess the response to our campaigns, and we also rely on public health trends themselves. As I’m sure you can all appreciate, looking for big changes in some of the national statistics around HIV can be challenging, given some of the time delays in monitoring, but obviously can give you a sense of sort of indicators and self report to data that we collect in our surveys is also important.

Two highlights from some surveys that we’ve done around our campaigns. One is a study a couple years ago that we did around our partnership with MTV. So when we surveyed a national random sample of sixteen to twenty-four year olds, we found forty-two percent of them recognized our campaign elements or the campaign elements we asked about, which were some of the recent programming pieces. Of this base of definite viewers, about a quarter, one in four, told us that in response to what they saw, they got tested for HIV or another STD or visited a doctor, and almost half had had a conversation in response to that. A similar study that we did more recently, looking specifically at some of the content we’ve been putting out, around, to reach African Americans around HIV/AIDS and this focused on primarily two of our campaigns. Our partnership with BET, which is a longstanding relationship focusing exclusively on AIDS in the black community, and a partnership with CBS and Viacom called No HIV/AIDS. So looking at what percent of our target group, which in this case was eighteen to twenty-four year old African Americans, were familiar with content from these campaigns. We found ninety-four percent had seen something that we had put out and among this base of definite viewers, a little over a third had again, either taken a concrete action of getting tested, which is a major messaging point for us or at least talking to a healthcare provider about their risk and testing and again about half were having conversations and these were reports in response to what was produced. So with that, I think I’m just in under my time, so I’ll close out my presentation and ask if there are any clarifying questions. No, I could have gone on. OK. I’ll take that as a good thing I hope and turn it back over to Leslie.

[Announcer] To access the most accurate and relevant health information that affects you, your family and your community, please visit www.cdc.gov.

  Page last modified Tuesday, May 06, 2008

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