I Love My Boo: Reducing Stigma Through Social Marketing and Social Media

Background: GMHC’s “I Love My Boo” is a first-of-its-kind social marketing campaign that uses positive images of young men of color sharing an intimate moment – a hug, a cuddle, a moment in the park – to contest the dominant images of young men of color associated with the HIV epidemic - disease, risk behavior, and pathology.  Instead, “I Love My Boo” presents an affirming face of relationships between young men of color with the message that “We’re about trust, respect, and commitment.”

Program background: The campaign grew out of GMHC’s CDC-funded Community Promise program.  In creating photographs for palm cards of “role model” stories, a model asked if he could pose with his boyfriend – which led to a broader discussion of the potential for developing a campaign based on images of positive intimacy between young men of color.  The idea fit very well with GMHC’s existing commitment to shifting community norms around individual resiliency factors that reduce stigma and promote education and HIV status awareness. 

Evaluation Methods and Results: GMHC tracked "impressions," i.e. individual views of our ads, and Internet networking data on Facebook.  “I Love My Boo” used dual social marketing and social media strategies to model a shift in community norms around young MSM of color.  In a two-month period in the summer of 2010, the campaign produced 64 million impressions from 1,000 ads in train cars and approximately a 500,000 impressions from 150 platform ads.  Ads in AM New York, a daily newspaper distributed free to subways riders circulated among 345,000 riders each day, and phone kiosk ads created over 50,000 impressions per day at 30 sites around the city.  The social media campaign used Facebook to bring those viewing the social marketing ads to a higher level of engagement.  The page has over 3,000 fans and features a variety of comments from viewers, including personal “I Love My Boo” stories and photos as well as conversations about the images and the campaign’s goals.  Through Facebook and other Internet exposure (blogs and news reports), the campaign has reached local Internet sites in Chicago, Atlanta, and other cities.  Local newspaper and television coverage brought the campaign to high levels of public awareness, which was also positively associated with public reaction to the wave of gay teen suicides and bullying in 2010.

Conclusions: "I Love My Boo" generated a great deal of press and publicity, locally and nationally, and it has become a noted model of breakthrough social marketing and social media work for reaching MSM of color.

Implications for research and/or practice: “I Love My Boo” is a social marketing campaign that demonstrates (a) the fundamental elements of resiliency-based campaign with young MSM of color, a subpopulation that experiences an elevated level of risk for HIV that is closely related to homosexual and HIV stigmas; and (b) the synergies to be gained by building a social media and networking component for a public social marketing campaign.