The social marketing campaign “PrEP4Love” successfully raised awareness of Truvada as PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) as an HIV-prevention tactic, according to the results of a recent study conducted by the Chicago Center for HIV Elimination (CCHE), reports the AIDS Foundation of Chicago.
Specifically, in the campaign’s first four months, the “PrEP4Love” ads garnered nearly 41 million unique views across social media platforms and 25,000 click-throughs.
The CCHE study also showed that a large proportion of visitors returned to the site and that visitors spent increasingly more time on the site.
Perhaps most significantly, the page listing health care providers willing and able to prescribe PrEP was found to be the most popular on the website, indicating that visitors were actively interested in getting a prescription for PrEP.
Additionally, data sourced from the campaign’s PrEPLine, a phone number that connects callers with PrEP resources in their area, indicated that many callers were transgender women of color, Black heterosexual women, and Black men who have sex with men—exactly the demographic the campaign was designed to reach.
This discovery is especially promising given that Black and same-sex-loving communities in Chicago (and the United States in general) are disproportionately affected by the epidemic. In 2017, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that Black people accounted for 13% of the U.S. population but 43% of all new HIV diagnoses.
In light of these findings, the study concluded that “grassroots-organized social movements promoting health equity can successfully sidestep the increasing power of commercial and market interests in shaping public health interventions.”
The citywide campaign was launched in 2016 by the Chicago PrEP Working Group (now the Illinois PrEP Working Group). “PrEP4Love” was advertised primarily on trains and buses, via digital campaigns and at pop-up events. The ads featured “intimate photos of individuals from Chicago communities that are especially vulnerable to HIV, particularly young, Black, gay and bisexual men and other men who have sex with men, transgender women of color and Black heterosexual women.”
When taken daily as prescribed, PrEP, reduces the risk of contracting HIV by 99% or more among men who have sex with men and 90% or more among women. (The risk reduction for women may very well be greater than 90%, but currently available research is insufficient to refine the estimate.) PrEP also reduces the risk of contracting HIV via use of contaminated needles by more than 70%.
The success of PrEP4Love could potentially foreshadow an increase in the use of sex-positive, identity-affirming marketing campaigns as messaging tools in the public health sphere.
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