Washington, DC — Challenges and potential for mass media and social marketing strategies to reach youth with HIV/Aids prevention messages were explored during a panel at the Global Health Council's 31st annual conference, "Youth and Health: A Generation on the Edge," held in Washington this week.
HIV/Aids has become the most devastating and challenging health ordeal the world has ever faced, panelists said. Governments and concerned parties are particularly concerned about the deadly disease's disproportionate effect on young people. A variety of campaigns to combat the epidemic have been tested, with media emerging as the most effective tool for reaching young people across the world, panelists said.
An example is the LoveLife program, a South African project that uses media to reach young people with HIV prevention messages.
Mandla Sibeko, National Program officer for LoveLife, described the group's "2010: Love to Be There" campaign. Sibeko said the campaign is especially appropriate because South Africa will be hosting the World Cup in the year 2010.
According to Sibeko, unless something is done now, by the year 2010, an estimated one million young people will be living with Aids, 7.5 million will be HIV positive, and 2.5 million will be orphaned.
LoveLife aims at halving the rate of new HIV infections, and significantly reducing sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy among 15-20 year olds by targeting 12-17 year olds. The program operates on the premise that "providing messaging" is not enough to achieve the substantial behavior change required to turn the course of the epidemic; it needs to trigger a new social movement, says Sibeko.
Part of the strategy, he said, is to get South Africans talking about the major drivers of the epidemic. He said causes of high-risk behavior are coercion, peer pressure, sex for money, low self-esteem, pessimism, lack of parental communication, poverty and low education.
Drew Altman, President and CEO of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, one of the largest private foundations devoted to health, said his group's recent survey of 12,000 South African teens and young adults in nine languages found that radio and television are the number one source of information on HIV for 15-24 year olds in the country, including those who live in rural areas.
The traditional public service campaign model which "too often results in a watered down message in a TV advertisement that runs at 2 a.m. in the morning" is not the most effective way to capitalize on the power of the media, Altman said.
Therefore his foundation developed a new model of public service campaigns, he said.
The Kaiser Foundation partnered with Viacom, a U.S.-based media organization, to pilot on a new model, the "Know HIV/Aids campaign." Its goal, Altman said, is to provide targeted preventive messages to at-risk groups in the U.S. and to raise awareness among the American population about the global HIV epidemic.
Viacom has made a commitment of more than $300 million in media to the campaign's first two years, making it the largest corporate commitment to HIV public education ever made, Altman said.
The Foundation has already received feedback from young people reporting that they visited a doctor or other health provider, were tested for HIV, delayed sex, used condoms or talked with a partner about safer sex because of something they saw in the campaign.
These campaigns have also changed American public opinion, as more people who now believe that spending money on HIV/Aids prevention in Africa and other developing countries will lead to meaningful progress, Altman said.
Altman acknowledged that media corporations are not public health departments.
"They exist to entertain and to make money," he said. "Several years ago, I developed a philosophy about this which guides our work - it is that you can't talk the media companies out of doing whatever it takes to entertain and make money, but you can enlist them in the proposition that they can entertain, make money, and do good at the same time and that, indeed, the two are mutually reinforcing."
Panelist Bill Roedy, President of MTV Networks International, believes the media has a critical role in the campaign against HIV/Aids and needs to do much more, his network included. With more than 50 percent of new HIV infections occurring among young people between the ages of 15-25, Roedy said MTV must take a leading role in communicating HIV/Aids prevention and awareness messages because it is the leading multimedia brand for youth, reaching a potential audience of more than one billion people in 166 countries.
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In response to youth audiences, MTV created the "Staying Alive campaign" in 1998. The effort is a partnership with UNAIDS, the joint United Nations program on HIV/Aids.
The campaign includes award-winning documentaries, concert events and discussion programs, public-service announcements, a multilingual Web site www.staying-alive.org, sexual behavior polls, and off-air marketing and promotions. Staying Alive aims at: raising awareness and knowledge about HIV/Aids and safer sex skills for young people; fighting the stigma and discrimination associated with HIV/Aids; empowering young people to take concrete action to protect themselves and others against HIV/Aids and engaging other businesses, media and organizations to form their own response to HIV/Aids.
Since then, Staying Alive has partnered with governments, non-government organizations, charitable foundations, business and media, including the World Bank, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Family Health International's YouthNet, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the National Aids Trust (UK), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Paul G. Allen Charitable Foundation, Population Services International's YouthAids, Levi's Jeans, Viacom and others.
