PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) is a proactive treatment that prevents contracting HIV and one key component of sexual health. Although our main audience, men who have sex with men, have the highest incidence of HIV infection, 65% are not taking PrEP. A combination of HIV-related stigma, low engagement in healthcare, and social awkwardness surrounding these conversations was turning our audience away from sexual health content. This was exacerbated as the continuing pandemic tanked both dating behaviors and sexual health conversations. We were faced with a hard reality – our standard approach to prevention education was not breaking through. Not only was sexual health not top of mind, even talking about it made our audience disengage. To increase awareness and impact with MSMs, we instead needed to meet them where they were, breaking our message out of the pharma mold to expand our reach in moments where they were already engaged.

We dove into understanding our MSM audience outside of just their health and wellness behaviors with the goal of identifying passionate environments that fostered both engagement and open conversation among an often-stigmatized LGBTQ+ community. What we found was that MSMs are 2.5x more likely to be avid gamers. In fact, there’s already a strong community of self-proclaimed LGBTQ+ “GAYmers” who had found community and fostered connections through gaming. This arena for escapism and fun is in direct contrast to the serious topic of HIV prevention and the sterile pharma spaces where that information is often located. It was the perfect opportunity to bridge the mental block on “sexual health talk” and destigmatize the conversation around HIV prevention by bringing it into the spotlight in a culturally led environment, all while reaching MSMs that weren’t already engaging in sexual health content across our pharma-led media plan.

The campaign was brought to life across our partner’s network over the course of 6 months and with varied presence supporting our sexual health message. The campaign launched in June, aligning with Pride month, and centered around the custom PSA which ran as pre-roll within male-targeted gaming content. To drive impact and authenticity across the site, we also tapped into GAYming influencers Evan Michael Lee and Justin More with a sponsorship of where sponsored a gaming stream bringing together these two influencers, which was also wrapped with our messaging to drive home the association between our brand and the GAYming community. Additional banner amplification across the platform ran alongside our custom PSA though the rest of the year, giving our brand and campaign constant alignment with gamers across the network and ensuring our important sexual health messaging couldn’t be missed. The custom PSA garnered 4M video views running through December.

Media metrics were beyond what we expected from a new partner in an environment where MSMs weren’t already familiar with our messaging. We’re at 4M video views and counting and the partner showed a 1.3x Sexual Health Visit Score, a Crossix metric that ties the platform to the likelihood that our audience completed a sexual health visit. With these metrics, we knew the campaign captured engagement and were able to correlate gaming MSM audiences with action. But the real win - we successfully widened our net to reach an incremental 40K MSMs, a portion of our audience that we weren’t reaching across the rest of our media by tapping into an environment that had < 2% overlap with other partners. By escaping the clinical realm of pharma advertising we brought sexual health messaging to new audiences and our brand one step closer to their goal of ending the HIV epidemic.