There was a fear towards HIV and HIV+ individuals, mostly LGBTI+, were marginalized in Turkey where hundreds of hate crimes towards homosexuals and transsexuals had been committed in the last 5 years.

Many people didn’t know how HIV is transmitted, diagnosed or treated; it’s a source of fear. Some people are even afraid of touching HIV+ people.

When it came to HIV+ people, they were uninformed about the test and treatment processes. Due to the dynamics of the society they lived in, they were afraid of sharing what they’d experienced and had pessimistic views for their future lives.

So, we created a year-long - starting from World AIDS Day - digital focused campaign which raised awareness about HIV+ in the community while aiming to encourage HIV+ individuals to get tested and start treatment.

We’ve specified our target audience as LGBTI, potential HIV+ individuals, patients’ and medical specialists’ associations, NGOs and the whole community.

Medical specialists’ and patients’ associations like Positive Living Association and Red Ribbon Istanbul as well as NGOs about sexual health and human rights attended our press meeting which doubled as a launch event.

We took web searches with the word “HIV” and related video/web contents for reaching potential HIV+ individuals, LGBTI individuals through Hornet, a social network for gays with 300.000 users in Turkey.

For the community, we used demographic segmentation both in digital and conventional media. We followed this multichannel communication process’ performance to choose the most efficient channels and focused on them.

Our campaign started on 1 December 2016 and will run until 1 December 2017, found itself a place in Hornet, Facebook, Instagram Youtube, Search Ads, Display Banner Ads, Truview Ads and mainstream media like ATL channels.