Getting young gay men in three of South East Asia’s megacities (Bangkok, Manila and Jakarta) to encourage their friends to take an HIV test was the aim of a new testXXX’s online campaign, Taking It, that’s being rolled out for World AIDS Day (Dec 1).
testXXX is APCOM’s flagship HIV testing campaign, founded in 2014, targeting young gay men in Asian urban cities with high HIV prevalence among gay men and other men who have sex men (MSM), who are often marginalised and have limited or no access to HIV prevention, testing and treatment.
The Taking Itcampaign was aimed to involve numerous social media influencers in each city who are popular among young gay men. Each influencer will post an online video pledge on their social media channel to take an HIV test before or on World AIDS Day while also nominating three of their friends to do the same. The friends will then be encouraged to post their own testing pledges online while also nominating three of their friends to take part, and so on. Thousands of young gay men to be inspired and get involved were aspiration
The influencers taking part in each city include YouTube vloggers, drag queens, fashion models, fitness experts and TikTok personalities, to name a few. While testMNLkept the name Taking It(given the English proficiency of their YMSM audience), testBKKand testJKTadjusted the campaign’s name intoชวนกล้าท้ามาตรวจand BERSAMASAMA,respectively.
The Taking Itcampaign was launched on 20 November 2018 on each city. A week after World AIDS Day, the virality of the challenge was shown in each city. More than a hundred thousand views and million impressions of pledging videos of the influencers were recorded.
There were dozens of positive testimonies from the influencers’ followers – some of them indicated that the followers took the test after seeing the pledging video. Below are some of the example of the translated testimonies from the followers:
The media coverage of the campaign also took off well with the traction from international news outlet such as GAY STAR NEWS, Hornet Storyand Instinct Magazine.
End
