The New York Times - Friday, December 1, 1995
Stuart Elliott

FACES and voices that are familiar from places like Broadway and Seventh Avenue -- as well as Madison Avenue -- are beginning to be featured in advertising meant to encourage the fight against AIDS.

Celebrities are the central elements of several public service and pro bono campaigns being introduced on or around World AIDS Day, which will be observed today for the eighth time. The trend indicates that personalities known to consumers are becoming more comfortable with helping to combat a disease that still carries a substantial stigma among many Americans.

People in the popular culture lending their names and their interest to this is helping to put a face on the crisis," said Daniel J. Osheyack, vice president for promotion and public affairs at Entertainment Weekly in New York. "Somehow it makes it more personal."

Entertainment Weekly, published by Time Warner Inc., will run on a pro bono basis two print advertisements with AIDS themes in the Eastern and Western editions of its Dec. 8 issue. Those ads, created by the Richards Group in Dallas, promote AIDS-awareness bracelets that are being sold by an organization named Until There's a Cure at stores including Bloomingdale's and the Body Shop; proceeds are being donated for programs aimed at AIDS care, prevention and education.

The ads initially feature the actor Matthew Broderick; the Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis, and the models Tyson Beckford, Bridget Hall and Mark Vanderloo. (Entertainment Weekly is running Mr. Broderick and Ms. Hall.) Tony Staffieri, president of Savvy Management Inc. in New York, a marketing and event agency that coordinated the campaign, said others who have committed to appear in future ads included Martina Navratilova and Joan Rivers.

The use of celebrities serves two purposes. One is to appeal to harried people as they switch television channels or page through magazines and newspapers, in much the same manner that stars are hired to sell consumer products.

"How do you attract more people to a cause for which they have been inundated with messages?" asked Nat Whitten, co-creative director at Weiss, Whitten, Stagliano in New York, which has created public service television commercials for Lifebeat, the music industry organization based in New York that seeks to fight AIDS. The commercials use tunes by the soul singer Barry White, the country singer Marty Robbins and the rock group L7.

Stars can also enable an ad on a serious subject like AIDS to avoid "getting too heavy-handed," Mr. Whitten said, and can pique the curiosity of younger people.

And the use of celebrities can also help campaigns to stand out among the flood of cause-related ads that the media are asked to run for free.

"We get an enormous number of public service announcements submitted to us, and look at each one on an individual basis," said Caroline Vincent, a spokeswoman for the MTV cable network in New York, owned by Viacom Inc.

Though "there isn't any one thing that put one above another," she said, "we look for messages that are approachable and appropriate for our audience." MTV and its sibling, VH1, are among more than 50 cable networks that plan today to run public-service commercials and programming with AIDS themes.

In another campaign with recognizable faces, television commercials and brochures produced in-house by the Gay Men's Health Crisis, the AIDS organization in New York, feature the actresses Kim Coles, Debi Mazar and Rosie Perez; the rap singer Queen Latifah; the playwrights Harvey Fierstein and Craig Lucas; the actors T. C. Carson and Mitchell Lichtenstein, and the drag performer John Epperson, better known as Lypsinka.

The public service campaign, carrying the theme "Fight the fear," is the first by the organization to focus on the issue of urging people to be tested for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

"Lots of people are scared to take the test," said Daniel Wolfe, communications director for the Gay Men's Health Crisis. "This is a way of telling personal stories without oversimplifying things."

In one instance, a celebrated person known by his name rather than his face or voice is using just that in a fund-raising appeal. The designer Kenneth Cole of Kenneth Cole Productions is running print ads, created in-house, to announce that 40 percent from all purchases of footwear and accessories made today at his 18 stores will be donated to the American Foundation for AIDS Research, or Amfar.

Mr. Cole's in-house agency will also produce a separate campaign for Amfar. Jay Blotcher, a spokesman for Amfar in New York, said that campaign is scheduled to be introduced on Tuesday.