loveLife Response to Nancy Coulson

The biggest concern is that there have been at least two subsequent pieces of evaluation of loveLife that need to be taken into account. The most important is the end of year 2 national random probability sample survey [1] that shed more light than end of year one evaluations.

The second research is a qualitative review of last year's billboards through 14 focus group discussions around the country. I think that this will also be useful in providing a better sense of young people's response to the billboard campaign.

The other major concern I have is that loveLife's mass media has been separated from the service components of loveLife. While obviously one of the objectives of the mass media is exactly that - mass media - the other main objective is to provide the framework and content for direct interaction with young people through all of loveLife's service programs - from the call centre, to the 15 Y-Centres, to the 107 NGOs engaged with young people through the loveLife franchise, to the 80 government clinics doing the same, to the 600 groundBREAKERS at the point of interaction with 12-17 yrs olds, through the loveLife Games with 250 000 participants, to the Love Tours and Love Train. We estimate that loveLife has direct face-to-face interaction with 100 000 young people a week from May to October, and 80 000 per week during the rest of the year.

For loveLife, normative change may occur through multiply reinforcing interactions with young people across all elements of their lives - when they go to school, participate on the sports field, go to social and youth clubs, attend clinics etc. loveLife's goal is a total experience of positive lifestyle for young people, rather than exposure to media on the one hand and participating in services on the other. To give a practical example, part of the Y-Centre program is a radio training and broadcasting program whereby young people acquire new computer and radio skills, engage with each other through talk and music, and "package" that engagement into programs broadcast on mainstream radio. This week dozens of young people are broadcasting live from the National loveLife Games involving over 10 000 young people, 2 000 teachers, a TV program and supporting print material. To separate out loveLife radio (as part of mass media) from loveLife service delivery ignores the entire construct of loveLife.

In this construct, use of media is also differentiated - so:

• TV is a flagship (eg, Scamto groundBREAKERS is the flagship for radio, print and extending across services - the groundBREAKER youth service program takes the themes and values of TV communication and tries to instill them in those young people's lives).
• Radio achieves higher coverage and interaction than TV
• Print provides interaction and shelf-life
• Billboards and taxi advertising positions the brand, provokes discussion and provides a toll free helpline.

The brand and the message are not undifferentiated - it's just that loveLife does not use all its media to push a message (outdoor media serves a different function). So, brand awareness and message take-out are two distinct objectives.

Our messaging is not confined to "talk about it" - that's the payoff line that provides the starting point for our communication construct which is:

• To motivate (pessimism is a predictor of high risk behaviour)
• Embed all communication in values of informed choice, shared responsibility and positive sexuality (coercion, peer pressure and transactional sex are predictors of age of sexual debut and number of sexual partners)
• Address key high risk sexual behaviours to encourage: older age of sexual debut, fewer sexual partners and assertion of sexual limits and protection (including condom use)

Another very important communication component is that aimed at parents: Love them enough to talk about sex. Using ten prominent South Africans (including Mandela and Tutu, the Deputy President and the Minister of Health), loveLife got South Africa talking - 15 000 calls taken every month to loveLife's parent line, a public statement by the President that South Africa needed to talk more openly about sex and sexuality, discussion in Parliament about the campaign and over 20 radio talk shows dedicated to the campaign.

I hope that the billboard qualitative survey will give a better sense of the impact of the billboard strategy (see outdoor objectives above). I'm not sure that it's correct to present the impact of loveLife's billboard strategy only in terms of a comment about one phase of the billboard campaign, the article by Halperin and Williams and our call centre figures. Neither is it fair, I don't think, to state that pre-testing is deficient because our post-phase evaluation show weakness in the creative (cause and effect are not that clear - just to share with you, often we find very different results in pre- and post-testing - part of it I think is that pretesting obviously cannot capture the national discussion that only happens once you've put the billboards up and media and others begin to interrogate meaning).

I think another important indicator is public awareness and media coverage of loveLife, largely as result of sustained outdoor media. Over 600 print articles, 120 radio interviews and 50 television inserts a year in South African media alone are in no small part due to the outdoor media - which pays for itself many times over through media exposure alone.

Just to say that Halperin and Williams made no distinction between Beyond Awareness billboards and loveLife billboards - for example, attributing condom promotion to loveLife. I'm also not sure that the best evidence concerning a public response to the billboards can be gauged from ad hoc questioning of individuals on a trip throughout South Africa. I just think that more systematic, objective (and not uncritical) evaluations are available - and we're happy to share them.

In summary, I think it would be a better reflection of loveLife to locate the "mass media strategy" in the context of loveLife's institutional support, service delivery and outreach. Acknowledging that 60% of loveLife is not mass media and then proceeding to discuss mass media only really misses much of what we're about.