Department of Health and Aged Care
Sexually Transmissible Infections (STIs) aren’t just uncomfortable physically, they’re uncomfortable to talk about. So when the Department of Health and Aged Care asked Carbon to come up with a campaign that could cut through to our First Nations audience, we got serious about being funny.
The brief
Despite progress in the management of sexually transmissible infections (STIs) over recent years, STIs remain a public health challenge in Australia. The prevalence of some STIs continues to rise, particularly in people aged less than 35 years, with First Nations peoples having a considerably higher burden of disease for all notifiable STIs.
Stigma and ‘shame’ relating to STIs has been identified as a significant barrier to the uptake of key behaviours, including testing, for First Nations audiences. First Nations people often use self-effacing comedy to normalise hard topics, so we knew it was an approach that could cut through serious, ‘boring’, government messages.
The good
OInspired by the well-known Australian ABC TV series ‘You Can’t Ask That’, we created comedy-centric live action Q&A video assets starring First Nations comedians Aaron Fa’aoso and Janty Blair that address common misconceptions around STIs and STI testing. These assets were then supported by a range of other playful assets across print and social media.
The ‘You Can’t Ask That’ style and format of the video assets allows the content to address silly, hard, embarrassing and confronting questions, helping us bust the shame and stigma around talking about these ‘taboo’ topics and encourages conversation among the target audience.
Working with an Aboriginal artist called Little Butten, we developed a cool, contemporary campaign mark ‘True or Gammon’ (True or False) that plays on common First Nations slang to help dispel the misinformation about STIs and to give the audience permission to ask questions... any question!
We also developed a series of playful and relevant patterns that we used across all assets from the live action videos to posters and animated social assets.
The impact
The impact By utilising a new approach the campaign stood out and broke through to the target audience. This was evidenced by the fact the campaign was widely shared by health organisations and on the ground by health workers and clinics (substantiated by a stakeholder EDM open rate three times that of the government average, as well as anecdotal feedback from the jurisdictions we collaborated with). So was the campaign a success? It’s definitely a case of ‘true’, NOT gammon!
