Entertainment Summit West - Los Angeles

Entertainment Summit West - Tina Hoff Transcript

Tina Hoff, Vice President and Director, Entertainment Media Partnerships, Kaiser Family Foundation

Thanks very much. For those of you who haven't heard of the Kaiser Family Foundation before today, we're an operating foundation, so we run and develop our own programs. One of those areas focuses on media and public education, which includes work with journalists and journalism training programs, as well as the study of entertainment media. The area I run focuses on developing partnerships with media companies to promote social issues. One of those campaigns is the one that Imara Jones from Viacom shared with you in the last session. We've also had long running partnerships with MTV, BET, Univision, and a number of other channels and networks over the years. I'm going to focus today's discussion on our very first partnership, which was with MTV, launched in 1997.

Some research that we did last year looked at what kind of an impact that campaign was having on the young people that we were setting out to reach. Before we get to that, though, since it is television and, and we have our videos to show, I want to share with you a few samples of some of the PSAs. I think these are a few of Allan's favorite ones that he had mentioned before, and some of the shows we've done with MTV so you can get a feel for what this campaign looked like. I will then talk about what effects it has had on the young people that we've been able to document. So, if we can role the video to start, that would be great.

(VIDEOTAPE):

“Presenting MTV's first national sex quiz, everything you wanted to know about sex, we weren't afraid to answer premieres Saturday April 20th at 1:00, kicking off MTV's yearlong Fight For Your Rights, Protect Yourself.
Welcome, everybody, to MTV's first national sex quiz. I'm John Norris. We're live in the MTV studios today, gonna be talking about everyone's favorite topic… yes, we're here to talk about sex and how to protect yourself which is what we are calling MTV's yearlong campaign to promote sexual health. Now, we know that you guys think about sex, like, oh, at least every hour. That's 'cause we took a poll and you told us so. And we figured you probably think you know pretty much everything there is to know about this topic, so we put you to the test. And as of this moment, an amazing number, 506,455 people have taken the poll and that's pretty awesome. That's at mtv.com and they've answered questions about condoms, contraception, protection, all kinds of issues. And you know what? The thing is we're kind of mystified because even as some of you guys did score pretty well on the quiz, you're still out there getting pregnant by accident and contracting STDs in record numbers. So, there's something not connecting there. We’re gonna try and figure it out.

MALE: I gotta go.
FEMALE: Take me with you to New Jersey.
MALE: I would, but my mom.
FEMALE: Right. So, could we just get some things out of the way? I slept with three guys in my life and we used protection every time, except the first time when I didn’t know better, but he was a jerk and he smelled like rust. Please don't be all coming over and falling in love with my roommate. Also, I get an HIV test once a year and I'm going in on Tuesday and I think you should come so we can do it together.
MALE: Why'd he smell like rust?
FEMALE: It was something with his plumbing.
MALE: Oh.
FEMALE: So...
MALE: Oh, yeah, the other thing. I'll go with you.
FEMALE: Cool.
NARRATOR: Come with me to get tested, easily said and done. Get reassured. Get tested. To find out where, call 1-888-BE-SAFE-1 or visit fightforyourrights.mtv.com. For information on safer sex, call 1-888-BE-SAFE-1.
B.J.: My name is B.J., I'm 18, and I go to New York University. I'm from Texas. I wanna be an actor. I like New York City because you are more free. Last week was spring break for me and I was thinking and I had free time and things were slowing down and I just started to get the little voice in my head to say, you know, it's time to get an AIDS test. And just think about what have you done with who, why, it just makes you think about stupid things, jumping into things, rushing into things, doing things when you're drunk or something.
B.J.: But you wanna push that away because you don't wanna face the thing, okay, now I might have just killed myself. Regret, it's not a fun emotion.
TIM: Look, just tell us, bro, did you do the deed or not?
MALE: Tim, I told you, it's personal, man.
MALE: Dude, you know she wants it.
MALE: Look, man, mind your own business.
MALE: But he's right. I've done it, he's done it, you know Momo's done it.
MALE: Momo.
MALE: It's part of being a man, dog.
MALE: Yeah, man.
MALE: Look, all right, man. We did it this afternoon, okay?
MALE: Prove it.
MALE: He did it.
MALE: So, you got tested?
MALE: Proud of you, man.
NARRATOR: For more information about testing, call 1-888-BE-SAFE-1.
(END OF TAPE)

TINA HOFF: That last PSA won an Emmy as part of the series two years ago for best public service campaign for MTV, and two of the other ones are up for an Emmy next week along with two of our other campaigns with the ET and Viacom. In the last seven years since we started working with MTV, we've produced more than 80 PSAs and 18 shows. Currently, our PSAs air on average of five to six times a day on the network. And the hotline that you saw tagged on some of those PSAs there has just logged its millionth caller this past spring. So, we know that these messages are getting out there and getting seen and by working with MTV, we think we're able to tap some of the best creative and communications talent to reach young people with the campaign.

Assessing the impact of campaigns such as this is of course challenging. There are a lot of elements that affect how young people think about sex and sexual health. We use a variety of different approaches to try and get a handle on what kind of effect we're personally having. We monitor the placement of all of our PSAs and shows. We get data from the networks about Nielsen ratings, how many people have seen our shows so that we can estimate the reach. We track the spots ourselves. We have our website and our hotlines that let us know who's responding to those messages, and we monitor that data very closely. We periodically use focus groups and dial tests to assess audience response to a particular show. We also conduct surveys, both callback surveys of our people who have phoned our hotlines to find out what kind of information they got from it, as well as national random sample surveys when we can. And it's this last type of research that I'm going to talk about here.

Last year in the spring of 2003, we conducted a national representative survey of 1100 young people in the U.S., ages 16 to 24 are our general target, about the Fight For Your Rights, Protect Yourself campaign, which is our partnership with MTV. The first question we set out to answer was, how many people are watching? How many people are we reaching? And what we found was that about half, 52% of all 16 to 24 year olds in the U.S. were familiar with our campaign. They knew the For Your Rights, Protect Yourself brand. We then took a closer look, and for the purposes of this research, focused on young people who had seen one or more of five specific ads that we asked about in this research, recent ads that had run so that we could get a group of defined viewers. As you can see here, that was about 42% of the total population of young people in the U.S. Among these definite viewers, as we called them, we wanted to take a closer look to find out how they felt about what they were seeing. Among the group of definite viewers, the people that we knew had seen the campaign, we found that they were telling us that the campaign was having a very positive effect on how they thought about these issues. Nine in ten said it personally made them think more about these issues, including a third who strongly agreed. They told us it was getting people talking about these issues, so, it had some sort of positive responses among our community. We also gave them an opportunity to critique the campaign, and let us know what they thought we could be doing better. As you can see, some of them, about a third, say that they feel like a lot of this is just going in one ear, one out the other. It's overstating the problem.

Beyond their personal views of what this campaign was doing for people their age, we wanted to know what impact it had had on them personally. We found that among those who had seen one or more of the sampling of messages that we asked about, between one and two, to one and three told us that they were more informed as a result of this messaging about any number of issues, and these are all topics that we cover throughout the campaign. It's a broad-based sexual health campaign. So, STDs, HIV, specifically, risks of oral sex, which was an issue that we took up in some of our programming and messages, communication, particularly with a partner, which is a major issue that we address in trying to encourage young people to be more open in their relationships.

You saw one of the PSAs dealing with that topic, safer sex and the use of condoms. We also asked them, what kinds of specific actions they were taking in response to the campaign…sort of one further step. Now that you know this, what are you doing with that information? And again, we found very sizeable numbers of young people had, and this is in response to what they saw, done things like had a conversation with their partner, talked to their parents about these issues, visited a doctor or their healthcare provider to raise this topic. And the last statistic, which I think is particularly compelling, that one in four actually sought testing for HIV or another STD as a result of the campaign. To further test whether what we were seeing was an effect of the campaign, we did a regression analysis with our data where we held constant variables like income and race and education to make sure that these were actually effects of the campaign versus other demographics. And we found significant differences remained in a positive direction on all of the measures that I just talked about, for those who had seen the campaign when these statistics were held constant.
And so we feel very good about what we're seeing. While we certainly don't feel that media alone is going be the answer to solving the sexual health crisis facing young people, I do think that this research shows us that when you engage media as partners, and full partners in developing campaigns and using their communications and creative expertise, you can see what a powerful ally they really can be in addressing these issues. That's part of what we're trying to continue doing with the work that we do with our media partners. So there you go. I told you it would be brief and hopefully we'll have some time for some questions after the other speakers.

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