Thinking About “Think Again” in Canada: Assessing a Social Marketing HIV/AIDS Prevention Campaign

Abstract

The Canadian "Think Again" social marketing HIV/AIDS prevention campaign, adapted from an American effort, encourages gay men to rethink their assumptions about their partners' HIV statuses and the risks of unsafe sex with them. To improve future efforts, existing HIV/AIDS prevention initiatives require critical reflection. While a formal evaluation of this campaign has been carried out elsewhere, here we use the campaign as a social marketing case study to illustrate its strengths and weaknesses, as a learning tool for other campaigns. After describing the campaign and its key results, we assess how it utilized central tenets of the social marketing process, such as formative research and the marketing mix. We then speak to the importance of theoretical influence in campaign design and the need to account for social-contextual factors in safer sex decision making. We conclude with a summary of the lessons learned from the assessment of this campaign.

New Arrivals to New York City: Vulnerability to HIV among Urban Migrant Young Gay Men

“…Specific HIV prevention messages can address risk-taking among urban migrants and other gay and bisexual men, including the reality of high urban HIV prevalence; how an HIV test is the only way to know if you or a partner has HIV; the difficulties some men have in discussing HIV and safer sex; and the benefit of making condom use automatic. Prevention education for new migrants could also address online sexual negotiation, hooking up versus dating, fallacies in some men's strategic approaches to risk reduction, and could challenge the use of imprecise language about HIV status such as''I'm clean'' (Lombardo & Leger, 2007). Content could be delivered through existing interventions, a tailored intervention like the San Francisco Newcomers' Assistance Program (Buchanan, 2005), social marketing campaigns, or via motivational interviewing with at-risk men who receive a HIV-negative test result.…”

No increase in HIV or sexually transmissible infection testing following a social marketing campaign among men who have sex with men

“…In this context, health authorities recommended a social marketing campaign to increase testing. Media campaigns to promote HIV testing have been previously shown to have a significant initial impact on the uptake of HIV testing8 and social marketing has been shown recently to be an effective strategy at changing sexual or testing behaviour among MSM 9 10…”

“…Social marketing has a number of important key components which contribute to its success: branding (message appeals to the target population), segmentation (message takes into account the target population’s attitudes and beliefs), price (the social, psychological or physical cost the target population associates with the suggested health-changing behaviour), placement (ensuring the suggested health-changing behaviour can be undertaken at a time desirable to the target population) and promotion (media, print, radio, television, person-to-person methods, informed by the social behaviour of the target population) 9 11…”

Branding HIV/AIDS communication: the social marketing campaigns of MTV and Viacom

“…Recent scholarship concerning the social marketing of HIV/AIDS education focuses much attention on measuring the reach and impact of campaigns on particular audiences in specific countries (Eloundou-Enyegue et al, 2005;Lombardo and Léger, 2007;Van Rossem and Meekers, 2007). Methodologically, a wide range of methods to evaluate the success of HIV/AIDS education campaigns have been used; however, there is a privileging of more experimental, and randomised control trials in much of the literature (cf.…”