Social Game Confronts Social Stereotypes of HIV

#10 Most Innovative Communication
Strategy

POS OR NOT

AGENCY: mtvU

CLIENT: mtvU

The AIDS epidemic rarely makes headlines these days, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that one in four of the estimated 1 million Americans infected with the HIV virus don’t know it.

The continuing social stigma of HIV discourages people who are living at risk from being tested. So last April, mtvU, MTV Networks’ college network, and the Kaiser Foundation, in cooperation with POZ magazine, decided to address that issue.

One more public information campaign didn’t seem likely to succeed. So mtvU devised an online social game, dubbed Pos or Not, aimed at confronting the social stereotypes people buy into and attempting to break down the barriers that forestall open dialogue about this modern plague.

“We knew we needed another tactic,” says Stephen Friedman, general manager of mtvU. “We wanted a viral game that mirrors the spread of HIV and AIDS. And we wanted something that could reach far beyond the issue.”

mtvU developed the campaign based on an idea suggested by a group of Florida college students. Pos or Not presented a graphic demonstration of the meaninglessness of physical appearance in determining the likelihood that a person is living with AIDS. The game, at www.PosOrNot.com, presented photographs of 100 people — half of them are HIV-positive and half of them are not — who were willing to share some details about their lives and their HIV status.

Game players are asked to guess whether the people portrayed are HIV-positive or not, based solely on their portraits and scant information about them, such as their musical tastes and weekend activities. The idea was to graphically demonstrate that it is impossible to tell whether a person carries the virus based on his or her race, gender, age or interests. The supposition was that the game would resonate as a turnabout on the popularity of that online phenomenon, HotOrNot.com, where men and women rate photos of other singles and post their own. And resonate it did.

“We thought it was a provocative idea, but we thought we could make it work,” Friedman says.

mtvU and Kaiser ran a multimedia publicity campaign to develop awareness and a supporting community about Pos or Not. The game was highlighted as part of mtvU’s Campus Invasion Music Festival, comprising three full-day music fests and 20 campus visits in major college locales, including Boston, Philadelphia and College Park, MD. Volunteers at the concert venues distributed Pos or Not branded condoms to pique interest.

PSAs featuring game participants were aired on MTV Networks. The game drew widespread press coverage and became an online viral phenomenon, spawning a Pos or Not Facebook application, online widget, banner ads and MySpace/Facebook pages created by game players. Major music artists, including Wyclef Jean, Fall Out Boy, Will.i.am and Alyssa Milano, lent their celebrity weight to the cause.

In the first month following its creation, Pos or Not was played 6.5 million times, and has been played 8 million times to date — a figure Friedman calls “staggering.”

And the impetus to attack stereotypical attitudes persists.

“What’s fascinating is that we’re getting dozens and dozens of people who want to become part of the game so it can stay fresh,” he says. “It spoke to a different kind of activisim.”

Next, Pos or Not may transmute into a game show on an MTV network, according to Friedman, who says the significance of it lies in taking a viral game and connecting it to a vital social action that may save lives.