Companies: Cable Positive and Kismet Films
Timeframe: 2004-2007
For more than 25 years, AIDS has been a major health crisis, and still there is no cure in sight. To reactivate viewer awareness about the disease and "join the fight" against
HIV/AIDS, Cable Positive, the cable industry's AIDS action organization, joined forces with Kismet Films to produce a series of public service announcements (PSAs). Because research
indicates that AIDS reaches a wide demographic, a key objective was to engage as many people as possible in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The PSAs were deemed the perfect solution.
A Celebrity Engagement
Cable Positive executives began brainstorming the initiative in 2004, at which point they decided to engage viewers about the gravity of the situation through celebrity
spokespeople
"From the very onset, one of the things that Cable Positive has done has been to use its access to the media and to talent to communicate messages of education and awareness. Early
on in Cable Positive's life cycle, PSAs were done with a mix of celebrity and natural situations with young people," says Steve Villano, president/CEO of Cable Positive, citing one
with Billy Bob Thornton and another with skateboarders. "Then, as the trend in advertising went toward using more celebrity endorsees to get people to pay more attention to things, we
decided that we would wage this three-year campaign around the theme of Join the Fight. The PSAs were a central part of it, but not the only part of it, because our Web site keyed to
that whole theme, getting people to contribute their time, talent and energy to the cause of fighting HIV/AIDS."
Despite the brainstorming during the earliest phases of the initiative, Cable Positive's methodology was somewhat sketchy until Kismet Films came on board.
"We would patch together a series of PSAs. We'd get some stuff from one producer, some from another," recalls Villano. "But, in terms of the feedback from most of the networks and
cable systems, they wanted there to be a consistency [with the PSAs]. They wanted there to be a seamless quality to it, and so we decided that we had to hire one producer to do this
with us."
Enter Kismet Films, which came highly recommended to Cable Positive as a result of Kismet's work with Lifetime TV. The production company worked closely with Cable Positive for the
three years of the Join the Fight campaign; they also were instrumental in securing talent for the PSAs.
Beyond The Public Service Announcement
But the work didn't just end with those spots. Cable Positive and Kismet Films also made several documentaries, one of which was a short behind-the-scenes-look at the PSAs, asking
the participating celebrities why they were donating their time to fight HIV/AIDS. There was also a short documentary on former Cirque du Soleil acrobat Matthew Cusick, who was fired
because of his HIV-positive status.
"That got picked up all over the country," says Villano. "The Sundance Channel ran it and we got a lot of requests for it from HR departments."
Cable Positive and Kismet Films also recently filmed a 45-minute documentary, "Positive Voices: Women and HIV," which ran last November and was also in support of the Join the
Fight campaign. The documentary, which starred "ER" actress Gloria Reuben, generated considerable attention from the media and elicited numerous requests for copies by organizations
and cable networks.
The collaboration between Cable Positive and Kismet Films created a synergy that resulted in success.
"[The partnership] went very well with us because as soon as we had this coordinated campaign, it just took off," maintains Villano. "The branding of Cable Positive with the Join
the Fight effort became very well known throughout the cable industry."
Forging partnerships with other organizations was key to implementing the campaign effectively, especially when it came to executing the Spanish-language PSAs.
"We did a partnership with the National Latino AIDS Commission so that we could share [the Spanish PSAs] with them," explains Villano. "We distributed them to all our networks and
systems. What the Commission did for us was track them and get them out to hundreds of AIDS service organizations in communities around the country. It serves a double purpose having
a partner like that. It gets the PSAs even further distribution than them just being televised. It gets them into local waiting rooms in clinics; it gets them into local AIDS service
organizations; and the National Latino AIDS Commission tracked how many people called in or came in to the local clinics as a result of seeing the PSAs."
Among the celebrities who participated in the early phase of the Join the Fight PSAs were: Nathan Lane, Chris Meloni, Jeffrey Wright, Matthew Broderick and Idina Menzel. Rosario
Dawson and S. Epatha Merkerson took part in last year's PSAs. Film directors Joel Schumacher and Bart Freundlich helmed previous spots.
According to Villano, the early days of the Join the Fight campaign generated three million hits to the Web site. The campaign also paved the way for a surge of volunteers to come
forward and contribute their time and effort to the program at "six chapters in major metropolitan areas," he says.
Adding celebrity luster to the PSAs was easy after many film and television stars got wind of the project. Villano recalls how he met Merkerson at a reception sponsored by Showtime
for the 2005 made-for-TV production of the Ruben Santiago-Hudson play Lackawanna Blues. "We were just chatting in line," he relates. "I asked her if she would be interested in
doing the PSAs." Merkerson enthusiastically agreed. This would set a pattern for many others to follow.
For 2006 to 2007, the final year of the campaign, acclaimed actor Liev Schreiber directed the English-language PSAs, while Rosie Perez directed the Spanish versions. Among the
celebrities in the English spots directed by Schreiber were World Light Heavyweight Champion Boxer Bernard Hopkins, actresses Naomi Watts, Famke Janssen, Lorraine Bracco and Judith
Light, playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner, TV personality Carson Kressley and designer Calvin Klein. For the Spanish-language PSAs directed by Perez, some of the participating
celebrities were actors Wilmer Valderrama, Judy Marte and Erick Elias, as well as Miss Universe 2007 Zuleyka Rivera. All the spots were filmed in color against a white background.
However, as successful as the project was, snags still abounded, most of which had to do with limited funds and logistics.
"For a nonprofit organization that has a budget like ours, which is only $2.5 million dollars, the challenge is money," says Villano. "We had to get the celebrities in and do it
pro bono. In the last year of the campaign, where we had 19 celebrities, the challenge was scheduling. We did that shoot in three days. And you know what kind of problems that can
create if someone has a scheduling problem..."
Another problem was how to engage the target demographic--people younger than 25 who are at risk for the new HIV infections--while making the PSAs both primetime-ready and
attention-grabbing.
"Broadcast networks show PSAs during the middle of the night," says Villano, "but cable is totally different. Our stuff is shown during primetime. For several years, we've had
what's known as a 'roadblock' in the business, where, at 7:59 pm on World AIDS Day [December 1], all our networks cooperate with our cable systems and run our PSAs in that time slot
so you can't channel surf and avoid them. But it also had to be of a caliber that people will say, 'Wow, this is good.' That's always a challenge--to find the right balance of what's
airable and what's going to capture the attention of people primarily under age 25 because that's where most of the new HIV infections are occurring."
A Positive Outlook
The campaign resulted in the following:
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Cable Positive's Web site generated more than two million new hits in the weeks following the campaign's release;
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The spots were picked up by Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Charter, Comcast and other cable systems across the country, which garnered a wide audience distribution;
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The "Join the Fight" campaign received an estimated $1 million in donated air time; and,
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The campaign became available nationally on most Video-on Demand platforms, which further meets the campaign's goal of reaching a national audience while also being viewed
repeatedly for free.
For Villano, the lessons learned had to do with communicating a consistent message, but also knowing when the campaign had run its course. "You can't do one thing one year, another
thing another year--you have to plan it out," he says. "What do you want to achieve? What messages do you want to communicate? How can we do this in a consistent fashion--something
that's not going to be tiring but will be ever fresh?"
As the Join the Fight campaign has ended, Villano and his team are now directing their effort to a new program called "We've Got Work to Do." Its PSAs will focus on stories of
young people who are HIV-positive. Villano feels the celebrity PSAs have peaked, which is why they're going with a new campaign that has a fresh format and more of a human interest
element due to its showcasing of non-celebrities.
"The new PSAs are like 30-second telenovelas--they're like little life stories," says Villano. "We think they're fantastic because they speak through the voices of people who are
infected with HIV and they speak exactly to the demographics that we have to go to. And we're getting an even better response to these reality-based PSAs than we were to the celebrity
ones. We're committed to this campaign for the next several years."
For its Join the Fight campaign, Cable Positive received the PR News' 2007 Nonprofit PR Award in the category of Public Service Campaign. PRN
CONTACT:
Steve Villano, [email protected]
Celeb Or No Celeb? That Is The Question.
If celebrities have peaked as spokespersons, should you still consider them for your cause and/or brand? Here's what Steve Villano, CEO and president of Cable Positive, said:
"It depends on which celebrities and at what phase they are in their development. [This applies] if it's a young nonprofit organization that wants to establish credibility and get
visibility. Look, if you're the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, you would be a fool not to use Michael J. Fox. So it really is dependent on the circumstances. For
us at Cable Positive, because we had used celebrities for a period of time, we saw this trend in our business of reality TV and that is one of the things that pointed us in the
direction of using real people--people who are affected by HIV and AIDS."