SFAF's Social Marketing Ads Ranks At The Top |
The $1.44 Million "Assumptions" Ad Campaign |
Social marketing media advertising campaigns are among the most efficacious, and among the most cost effective. |
The worst of SFAFs waste comes when it neglects to do any HIV prevention media campaigns whatsoever, since those who have not been reached with basic prevention information may end up seroconverting in the absence of a sustained advertising campaign.
This is exactly what is occurring as January 2004 begins: SFAF is not currently running a prevention ad campaign, and hasnt run one in over two years. Indeed, it appears that SFAF has scrapped its HIV prevention advertising campaigns in the Bay Area precisely in order to have spare private money, as SFAF prefers to call it, so that it can spend well over half of its Program Services budget on Africa. The dearth of SFAFs social marketing has not gone unnoticed, nor has the timing of its last ad campaign, the so-called Assumptions campaign, which ended several months before SFAF launched its global affiliate non-profit, Pangaea.
But when it does rise to the challenge and actually conducts an ad campaign, SFAFs wasteful spending is phenomenal, as the report below documents. It took delivering this report to SFAFs Board of Directors before the Assumptions ad expenses were reigned in.
This web page will be updated in early 2004 to cover more of SFAFs ad campaigns; but to get you started, heres a report written in early 2000.
The $1.44 million Assumptions Ad Campaign March 2000 Top | |
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This
report, presented as public testimony at the SFAF Board of Directors
meeting on March 28, 2000, discusses the How Do You Know
What You Know (a.k.a.,. the Assumptions Phase I
advertising campaign that had scant appearances in the media,
but was developed at great cost. Shortly after presenting
this testimony, SFAFs Gay Life manager mysteriously
vanished from SFAFs payroll; someones head rolled,
but it wasnt a senior management head, it was the unfortunate
low head on the totem poll. As well, possibly as a result
of this testimony, SFAF began recruiting for a new independent
auditor, switching from Deloitte & Touche (to who I had sent
this report and other correspondence) to PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
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