While in Chelsea this weekend, I walked past a phone booth with an ad by Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) promoting safe sex. There always seems to be a new ad campaign promoting safe sex in Chelsea, but instead of the typical white man staring at you with STD statistics written below, this ad showed two African American men nearly kissing with a tagline on how safer sex is “how we show our love.”
I did a search on the “I Love My Boo” ad campaign and found some NYC bloggers have covered this campaign already. Living Out Loud blog has photos of all of the ads in the series – which focuses on raising awareness of safe sex among African American and Latino gay men.
My first thought was that the ads seemed a ? stereotypical, as readers of Rod 2.0 have noted. The men in the ads are wearing what blog readers referred to as “hood attire” and the text is written as slang.
However, the slang and photos are appealing to GMHC’s target audience for this campaign: African American and Hispanic men that have sex with men. This population, according to The New York Times and reported by Rod 2.0 have seen an alarming 34 percent increase in HIV infection from 2001 to 2006 in New York City alone.
Additionally, GMHC launched the “HIV: We’re Not Taking it Lying Down” campaign which promotes safer sex among women of color.
I think GMHC actually did great market research for these series of ads. Beyond that, it’s the perfect campaign to show that LGBT marketing goes beyond the average gay white male. Our community is a diverse one – full of different races, interests, and genders. What works to communicate an effectively to one audience may not work for another. In this case, GMHC decided to do display advertising campaigns and strategically brought it to the streets and neighborhoods “where HIV infections are disproportionately high among women and young men of color,” according to a GMHC press release.
The campaigns does more than promote safe sex among women of color and African American and Latino men who have sex with men, it also raises awareness of the fact that these communities exist – and promotes an opportunity for marketers of products that include these target audiences to engage in LGBT marketing efforts that are properly researched in order to ensure the best and most engaging messages are delivered.
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It’s important to acknowledge that these ads are targeting a very specific economic and regional sub-set of the multicultural demographic.
These ads don’t target gay people of color generally by any means. They wouldn’t work in the mid-West or on the West coast. And they wouldn’t work for an educated, upper-income population.
While I applaud the GMHC for creating a campaign to target a particularly vulnerable population – indeed their efforts are sorely needed – I would hope we could refrain from conflating race, class and geography so carelessly. While they may certainly overlap in some places, they’re by no means interchangeable.
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Leyla Farah
Cause+Effect – Public Relations with a Purpose