When you're targeting teens, talk to teens and only to teens. You'll lose them if you adult down the language to avoid offending or confusing grown-ups. That's according to Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, which has been sending a hip- and tough-talking get-HIV-tested message to sexually active, urban teens.
Here's how tough-talking: This is the first time since the program began three years ago that the subway has agreed to run the ads, says Dr. Donna Futterman, director of the Adolescent AIDS Program at Montefiore. In part, that exclusion was due to concern about offending adults with "in your face" language and images.
The transit company also objected to the use of a typeface that mimicks graffiti, a long-standing subway problem. Montefiore offered to replace it, but before now, even that wasn't enough to get the ads underground, says Futterman. Why the change of heart? "Maybe this issue has evolved," she suggests.
Facing the Issue
Montefiore's campaign targets teens because 50% of new HIV infections hit 13- to 24-year-olds, says Doug Stroup, SVP of Medisphere Communications, which joined the campaign last year. It targets urban youth living in African-American and Latino communities because two-thirds of new infections occur there, and urban communities are hardest hit. New infection rates have declined among whites. "We've learned that young people don't think they're at risk [for AIDS because] they do a visual test: 'My friend doesn't look sick, so let's do what we want,'" Stroup says. And emergency rooms and doctors were not offering testing consistently, adds Futterman.
What's The Deal
The Get Tested campaign includes paid ads on CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio) stations Hot '97 and Z100, in theaters and outdoor - moving billboards, combined with community outreach, says Futterman. Print materials include stickers with a hotline phone number, cards with lists of "health programs near you" and The Deal: A Zine to Live By.
The 16-page zine, the size of a CD, is the only part of the campaign that's at all subtle about the HIV message. It's overt in half of the articles and the HIV resources, played down but still evident in stories about dating tips, and nowhere in stories of music reviews and tips about career success and general fitness. That's because kids don't want to read about HIV, says Stroup.
From the program's first year, peer education and street-marketing efforts by youth volunteers have been key to the program's success, prompting 500 schools and stores to distribute brochures about the importance of testing. Those efforts were joined last year by a town hall meeting that attracted 300 kids, aired on local cable stations and won the Tony Cox Award for video production given by Cable Positive, the cable industry's AIDS organization.
The second town hall meeting, hosted by Hot-97 Radio's Lisa Evers at Apollo Theatre on Monday, included skits by Star Team Theatre, a troupe of HIV-positive teen actors that's affiliated with St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital. The meeting launched Get Tested Week, Oct. 25-30. The week, which highlights health programs and free counseling and testing at sites throughout New York City, "is a great testing tool. It's like the National Smoke Out," says Futterman.
Testing the Testing Message
This year, the Adolescent Medicine HIV/AIDS Research Network, chaired by Futterman, is extending to five more cities - Baltimore, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia and Washington - with $1.5 million in funding by the National Institutes of Health, Health Resources and Services Administration HIV/AIDS Bureau and the William T. Grant Foundation.
The program is also seeing more calls to Montefiore's Adolescent AIDS hotline, going from about 1,200 calls in the first year of the campaign to about 2,000 for the second year, says Futterman. More important, she saw an increase of a couple of hundred more people being tested in 1998 as a result of the campaign.
And although the campaign isn't expressed in terms of impressions - "that's our next evaluation step," says Stroup, it has received coverage in The New York Times and appearances by Futterman on Good Morning America, Montel Williams, CNN and local TV news shows.
(Montefiore Medical Center: Dr. Donna Futterman: 718/882-0322; Medisphere: Doug Stroup, 212/213-4211, Griffin Bacal: Cari Stafford, 212/415-3285)
How to Talk to Teens, Yesterday, Today
Montefiore Medical Center's Adolescent AIDS Program to encourage HIV testing targets urban youth in part with catch phrases that speak street slang of urban youth, using phrases like "gettin' busy" and "hittin' it" for having sex. Gotta stay current. Last year's campaign phrases - "hittin' the skins" and "knockin' boots" - are so 12 months ago. Griffin Bacal, which produced the campaign's print, radio and TV ads pro bono, also wrote the headlines. Futterman tested them with teens who came to the clinic, says Cari Stafford, associate AE, Griffin Bacal.