Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Wall Street Journal - December 3, 2002
Vanessa O'Connell, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
That might have been the fate of a new commercial, "Kids," intended to raise awareness of AIDS and its toll around the globe. But the commercial escaped the middle-of-the-night syndrome earlier this week, after a group of cable outlets used the Madison Avenue version of a television "roadblock" to get some high-profile exposure during prime-time Sunday.
That night, a group of about 100 cable outlets voluntarily showed the same 30-second spot precisely at 7:59 p.m. Eastern time. The tactic was intended to force a large number of viewers to watch the commercial, created by Publicis Groupe's Leo Burnett. "The idea was that you can't change channels to miss the message," says Steve Villano, chief executive of Cable Positive, a 10-year-old nonprofit group based in New York, which organized the roadblock.
The ad features the voice of actor Michael Douglas and portrays emotion-tugging scenes of orphans, representative of children who have lost parents to AIDS. As somber music plays, small kids walk the streets alone and try to get through life's daily tasks without adults. Mr. Douglas's voice equates the 14 million children orphaned by AIDS with every child under the age of five in America. "AIDS is preventable. Apathy is lethal," the ad warns.
"The spot was moving for our viewers," says Carole Black, chief executive of Lifetime Entertainment Services, which has two cable networks aimed largely at women that participated in the cable roadblock. "Women tend to be the caretakers for families." Lifetime is a joint venture between Hearst and Walt Disney.
Cable Positive, a cable and telecommunications industry AIDS action organization, provided the spot to the cable networks, such as Lifetime, Discovery, the Food Network and SoapNET, through a satellite feed. Mr. Villano estimates that 35 million to 50 million cable-television households saw an anti-AIDS message during the roadblock Sunday night. An estimated 74 million households subscribe to basic cable, according to Nielsen Media Research, a unit of VNU.
The tactic comes at a time when many nonprofits are struggling to stand out. "It is difficult to get attention for anything in PSA-land anymore, let alone get a public-service ad shown," says Carter Eskew, an advocacy-advertising specialist at Glover Park Group, an agency in Washington.
On average, only 0.4% of air time goes to public-service announcements on any topic, and 43% of those commercials are presented midnight to 6 a.m., according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation of Menlo Park, Calif., a nonprofit group that supports its own AIDS awareness campaigns. The creative content of the "Kids" ad is sponsored by the United Nations Foundation in partnership with the Advertising Council, a nonprofit group that in 1988 was one of the first organizations to use the word "condom" in a commercial for AIDS prevention. The Ad Council says that on average, about 30% of its PSAs are shown during the graveyard shift.
The 30-second "Kids" commercial is the primary vignette in a broader anti-AIDS campaign. AOL Time Warner has agreed to place some of the ads prominently in its media properties. Julie Hughes, director of outreach at the United Nations Foundation in Washington, says she hopes network broadcasters and cable outlets both will continue to show the ads in coming months.
One drawback of the roadblock approach is that in the era of niche programming, certain messages might not be effective with a particular television audience. MTV and BET, each owned by Viacom, participated in the 7:59 p.m. roadblock Sunday, though neither chose to use the orphan message in "Kids." Instead, they showed their own anti-AIDS spots.
Pulling off a successful roadblock depends largely on how hot a particular issue is, says Steve Dnistrian, an executive vice president for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. In the past, he says, the antidrug group has tried the simultaneous programming of Saturday-morning cartoons that have antidrug themes. "We haven't seen an advertising roadblock done on any issue for quite some time."
Write to Vanessa O'Connell at vanessa.o'connell@wsj.com
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