Entertainment Summit West - Los Angeles

Entertainment Summit West - Imara Jones Transcript

Imara Jones: Director, HIV Initiative, VIACOM

Good morning and thank you all for coming. Thank you to Sonny, and to everyone else for putting this together. I think, like almost everyone else in this room, I'm here because Sonny Fox told me that I had to be. I thank him for that. And it's so terrific to follow Neal Baer. I think one of the things that I've learned, and why I'm so incredibly proud to be a part of this industry, is because I think that the people that comprise the entertainment industry, for all of the bad rap that it gets, are simply incredible. And that by and large, the reason why people get into this business, is largely what Neal talked about, and that is the ability to tell stories and to reach people. Most people don't get into it for any other reason. I think that Neal is an incredible representative about what's best about media and entertainment and communications. Not only is he an incredible storyteller but clearly, an incredible human being, so thank you.

I’m here now to talk about how, what Neal spoke about, in terms of what he does with individual shows, how, an entire company, a media company, can put its entire resources behind a public health issue, such as HIV/AIDS. How a media company can use everything that it has to not only produce messages but also to have, at the other end, an outcome.

Let me just tell you what we're doing and then the idea behind it. What we decided to do was to look at the issue of HIV and AIDS. As Allan Rosenfield mentioned, our company has a long tradition of working on these types of issues, first at MTV, and then BET. Both of those are in partnerships with the Kaiser Family Foundation and my counterpart, Tina Hoff is here representing them, and she has done a lot of work with Neal Baer, and a whole host of other people as well.

From a company-wide perspective, Viacom decided to get behind the issue of HIV and AIDS by using all of our assets. Fundamentally, what drove us was that most people get their information in the United States from the media, from television, radio, and the internet. And secondly, because HIV/AIDS is a disease that is treatable, but not yet curable, one of the primary tools in combating this disease is information in entertainment and the media. The U.N. estimates that two-thirds of all estimated cases of HIV/AIDS could be prevented through effective education and messaging efforts. One of the things that we know how to do is to talk to people, to engage them in their lives, to get them to think about things differently - to have different conversations, and from time to time, to buy things that they may not have known that they wanted to buy. That's something that we know how to do. So, HIV/AIDS was a perfect issue for us to marry our skill set with an existing public health issue and problem.

I think that that's a very important starting point in terms of, what do you have, what's the problem, and then, how do you marry those two things together to do something about it? What we decided to do was to take the entire range of assets that we have: television and cable, radio, outdoor, a motion picture studio, a television studio, and to put all of that behind the fight against HIV and AIDS. That's the first point, a multi-year coordinated cross-platform to utilize in the fight against HIV and AIDS.

Secondly, we wanted to use the assets that we have, and one of those is on the airwaves. So we decided to use public messaging. The other is on-air programming because we produce an incredible number of television programs, news and employee education elements. So those are the things that we have to be able to apply to this. We wanted to target the populations where the disease is spreading fastest. We wanted to be smart about how we tackled the disease. Thankfully, in terms of being able to make a difference, a lot of Viacom's assets match up very closely to the populations most affected by the disease. For instance, half of all HIV infections, both in the United States and around the world occur under people that are age 25. We have the leading platform for reaching young people. That's MTV. The same is true for African-Americans and BET and UPN, and the list goes on and on in that way. Viacom is particularly well suited to do something from that perspective, as well.

We then decided to put a lot of money behind the campaign so that it would make a difference. We decided to treat this like it was a commercial campaign. We think that one of the reasons why there is trouble in terms of these campaigns being impactful and effective is that they're treated as something that's done out of a back pocket, or on the side. What Viacom wanted to do was to treat this as a commercial campaign and to have this effort swim with the tide of the rest of the company. In that way, we can leverage everything else that's going on. From shows to events to-- you name it. That has allowed us to have tremendous, tremendous leverage. It's also allowed us to engage our employees. There are literally thousands of people who, at some point, during the year, have something to do with this program. Whether it be a set dresser or a person in a press unit or someone in an executive office, it runs the full gamut.

These are just some very simple rules that you would use if you were structuring, to pick a bad example, a Burger King campaign. You would want to try to get it in as many places as possible. You'd want to try to get it both broadly, where people could see it, and also deeply, so that means that they see these campaigns many different times. You would also want to make sure that the messages were strategically placed so that the people that you wanted to buy your product would get that message. And so, that's what we have done.

For instance, we've produced approximately 45 television messages that have now run over 120,000 times the past few years. We've done 23 television programs. And all of that activity has led to a tremendous audience response. One way of following this, is the number of unique visits we've had to our website where people can find out where to get tested for HIV and other local resources; fifteen million people in the last year and a half and hundreds of thousands of calls to various hotlines.
This just gives a sense of the broadcast programming on AIDS that we've done over the past few years, which both through original airings and syndication have reached tens of millions of people, and millions more through syndication. One of these programs, Girlfriends, was shown when I was in Bangkok for the International AIDS Symposium. One of the episodes that program did on HIV and AIDS was airing that morning on Thai television, translated into Thai. And that wasn't something that was done just for that day. That's just a part of the normal syndication pipeline that Viacom has, in terms of distributing its programs.

And so, what we're able to do here on AIDS actually has big impacts around the world. That's yet another example of using something that the company already does to help fight the disease. One of the things that we were surprised about is just how many people had seen one of the ads, or recognized the KNOW HIV/AIDS brand. Half of all American adults, and 66 percent of young people and 84 percent of African-Americans recognize it, and its recognition has grown every year. These are the types of numbers that you would want to see if you were running a commercial campaign.
One thing that is interesting, and I think people like Sonny and others, have helped to make this entire field “hip”. But when we started this program two years ago, there was no way to know that it was going to be a success. It could have been just as much a huge flop as it has turned out to be a success. And so, the fact that the program won an Emmy and a Peabody and other recognition is absolutely stunning. It pleases us because we didn't have a clue in the spring of 2002, when we were working hard on this campaign and putting it together, that it was going to actually work.
One of the things that we want to talk about is what are the next steps and how do you keep these types of things going. I think, actually, scale is an impediment to continuing to find new ways to keep the momentum behind something like this going. And, so, hopefully, that's something that we can talk about. I mean, big is clearly great and is impactful, but it takes a lot of entrepreneurial ideas and activity to figure out how to keep pulling a rabbit out of a hat. How do you keep telling a new story? How do you keep it going without having fatigue on one issue? But we're not there yet. And we're very much looking forward to the launch of a year three of our campaign in January.

Clearly, show development is one of the most important and impactful aspects of our campaign, as Neal spoke about from a day-to-day level. Some of the research that Kaiser has done on impact, is in that area as well. Telling stories in a format where people are comfortable with supposed-individuals, or those people that come through screens that they already trust and have a relationship, is the best and most effective way to communicate information. Everything else that we do in terms of producing PSAs and messages help to amplify what people see on television and reinforce it. That clearly is the center of gravity for these types of efforts. I can't say that enough. I think one of the most important things that we have not encountered, but from time to time other people have mentioned, is in terms of getting the producers or writers to believe that this is potentially a do-good part of a program, and it doesn't have anything to do with them delivering a show every week. But that's an incredibly difficult thing. If you think about it, how do you every week tell a great story for an hour that's going to keep millions of people coming back. But the irony that is that at the center of all these public health issues and crisis, are human dramas - are human stories. There are human beings at the core of these stories and they are actually ripe in a whole host of ways for telling stories that don't normally get told, as Neil was touching upon before.

We hope to initiate a script contest at Paramount the movie studio as yet another way to tell stories and to engage a part of the company. And one of the things that we are most excited about is through our partnership through Kaiser and their relationships with Gates and the United Nations to work on using, the expertise that we've gained here in the United States to help seed efforts around the world. We have a relationship with the BBC where messages are produced for Africa and the Caribbean region with 60 million people in seven languages or eight languages many times a day. In Russia, we partner with GAZ Prime Media, that country's largest media organization to help to replicate what we've been able to do here in the United States, but actually on a larger scale.

Here in the United States it's just Viacom. And although we are big, we're not everything. In Russia they've actually to put together all of the big media players to do something on AIDS because of that’s country's severe crisis. We're working to do the same thing in China. I think that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and hopefully we can't let up because, as big a crisis that HIV/AIDS is, it's the worst catastrophe in human history, and shows no signs of letting up, so we can't let up. With that I think what I would like to do is just show you what we've been doing through a videotape and leave it at that. Thank you.

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