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Background: Act Against AIDS is a national initiative launched in 2009 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the White House to refocus attention on HIV and AIDS in the United States. Act Against AIDS focuses on raising awareness of HIV among all Americans and reducing the risk of infection among the populations disproportionately affected by HIV – gay and bisexual men, African Americans, and Latinos. AAA is an umbrella program that comprises multiple targeted social marketing campaigns for both healthcare providers and consumers and includes national and community partnerships.
Program background: As part of the Act Against AIDS initiative, CDC will launch the first National Hispanic/Latino HIV/AIDS Awareness Campaign (HILA campaign) in summer 2014. The campaign will seek to increase awareness of HIV among U.S. Hispanics/Latinos by encouraging information-seeking behaviors and promoting conversations about HIV with family members and peers. In advance of the campaign launch, CDC has developed partnerships with media and entertainment organizations to support pre-launch and post-launch messaging within Hispanic/Latino communities. As part of a new partnership with People En Español (PESP), CDC participated in the second annual PESP Festival in San Antonio, Texas in early fall 2013. CDC had a booth at the festival, attended by over 10,000 people, featuring the Spanish-language version of the Let’s Stop HIV Together campaign. Upon launch of the HILA campaign, CDC will work with PESP to prominently feature campaign messages in a tear-out that will appear in over 500,000 printed copies of the magazine and will distribute campaign materials at the 2014 festival. Through a media partnership with MTVtr3s, the HILA campaign will have high visibility to the target audience through TV programming on their network and support of a community engagement event in New York City. MTVtr3s will air the HILA campaign PSA on their network throughout the duration of the campaign and provide social media support for all campaign messages.
Evaluation Methods and Results: These partnerships will essentially provide the campaign with cost effective options for reaching the campaign’s hard to reach target audience. While actual preliminary data on campaign reach should be available by the time this presentation takes place, it is expected that the insert in PESP magazine will reach over 7.5 million members of the target audience alone.
Conclusions: The unique partnerships and media placements highlighted in this presentation are critical to ensuring that this campaign reaches wide segments of the U.S. Hispanic/Latino population. Additionally, pre-seeding campaign messages through partners can be an effective strategy to ensure message penetration.
Implications for research and/or practice: Partnerships with a diverse set of media organizations (including the private sector) can help government agencies expand the delivery of key messages to target audiences. The private sector often has a reach that goes beyond what traditional government partners can provide and are typically eager to support meaningful behavior change efforts.