BBC News - Tuesday, 9 December, 2003
Nigel Wrench

Create a 30 second radio spot that will have maximum impact.

India, China and Russia, the target countries, could hardly be more different from each other - but that was the challenge.

The project was designed to show how extraordinarily hard safer sex education is.

Urging people to wear a condom is not in any respect like trying to persuade them to switch brands of lavatory paper.

At the offices of J Walter Thompson in upmarket Knightsbridge in London, they were less daunted. Giles Hedger and Charity Charity are used to selling globally and gave me what amounted to a free seminar on how to do it.

I pulled out a condom in a black wrapper. "But what about selling this?"

Giles took it: "I think what you need to do is to create positive associations around this, as opposed to fears, and reinvent what this could be in life, within the conceits of adland of course," he said.

Charity: "One way of looking at is it's not just a way of avoiding death but it could be a passport to life. You could look at this thing and actually this allows you 15, 20, 30 years.

"This is a passport perhaps to meeting your children, your children's children and your great-grandchildren."

Beyond the adspeak there was an idea - try to turn the condom into something aspirational, something you want, as opposed to something you have to use, albeit reluctantly.

But it's a long way from ideas in Knightsbridge to the reality of life in Beijing, Moscow and Delhi.

Making ads

My first attempt at an ad came after talking to a leading anti-smoking campaigner.

"Don't make not wearing a condom taboo, it'll just be more attractive," told me.

I also spoke to the head of Britain's biggest Aids charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust. "If there was an easy way of promoting condom use we'd have found it by now," he advised.

The ad also followed hours lying awake at night thinking what an absurd project this was, countered by those terrifying statistics - every 11 seconds someone, somewhere in the world is infected with HIV.

Back at JWT, Charity and Giles were more polite than I deserved.

They took apart the ad and suggested some changes. Put more characters in it, get under the skin of the people I was talking to.

We'd sent BBC reporters to try out the ad in our three countries. "Erotic," said one respondent, "taboo," another. "Not aggressive enough," said a Russian. "The migrant workers won't understand," said someone in China.

"Disruption is a good thing," said Giles. Meaning don't worry if you're breaking a taboo.

I played the resulting revised ad over the sound system at The Box, a gay bar in Covent Garden in London where the clientele have probably, over the past 25 years, heard just about every safer sex idea going.

"Terrible," said the man next to us as the ad finished. I'd attempted to place a condom as a luxury that everyone could afford, with the catch line "condoms - love the feeling of life".

"The trouble is that condoms don't feel better," said Matthew Hodson of GMFA, a health promotion group whose safer sex ads are always direct and sometimes provocative.

Fighting stigma

It was hard to know where to turn. By chance, I came across a review of a book whose title I could associate with: "Why HIV/AIDS Prevention Campaigns Fail".

I met the author, Cathy Campbell, at the London School of Economics.

Her book details her experience with a well-financed, grassroots-linked, community-based HIV project in a South African mining community.

After a year, HIV rates went up, not down. Aids was so stigmatised, many people just refused to recognise it was there. It was as if the horror was simply too great to contemplate.

My little ad wouldn't have stood a chance. "You have to have government leadership," she said.

"What about," I asked, "if the leaders of my three countries each took a condom from their pockets every time they were on television?".

"That would help, it would help certainly! I wonder where one would find a leader to do that? Has it happened anywhere?"

She thought a moment: "I have to say I hope that it has, I really hope that it has. But I'm not particularly aware of that having happened."

In the end I've decided not to make a final advertisement at all. Simply an appeal. As the statistics show, this could hardly be a greater emergency. So, Mr President, Mr Prime Minister, Mr Religious Leader: Take a condom from your pocket. Who knows how many lives you could save.

Doomed from the start?

In one way this project was always going to fail.

I was never going to come up with an ad with an approach that no-one has yet heard of.

But for me this journey's success has been in beginning to understand the magnitude of what needs to be done and the leadership the Aids pandemic demands.

It's probably not an entirely neutral journalistic standpoint, but then HIV doesn't understand neutrality.

031209
BB031230

Always watch for outdated information. This article first appeared in 2003. This material is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between you and your doctor.

AEGiS presents published material, reprinted with permission and neither endorses nor opposes any material. All information contained on this website, including information relating to health conditions, products, and treatments, is for informational purposes only. It is often presented in summary or aggregate form. It is not meant to be a substitute for the advice provided by your own physician or other medical professionals. Always discuss treatment options with a doctor who specializes in treating HIV.

Copyright ©1980, 2003. AEGiS. All materials appearing on AEGiS are protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under U.S. copyright and other laws and are the property of AEGiS, or the party credited as the provider of the content.