From the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, promoting condoms and their use has been a primary strategy. Social marketing projects, which use mass media, entertainment and other commercial marketing approaches, have led to large-scale changes in condom use, particularly in Africa. Just a few years ago, there were less than a million condoms used annually in all of Africa. Today, there are nearly 20 million condoms sold a year in Ethiopia alone, with similar levels in several other African countries. For counseling condom use among women to be effective, men have to be willing to use condoms.
Counseling is a good, worthwhile thing.
But the mass media approach is much more cost effective in reaching people who need to be using condoms but are not. That jingle is what sells toothpaste, not individual counseling. When possible, social marketing projects promote condoms for both disease and pregnancy prevention. Entertainers, rock groups and others get people talking about condoms, helping to remove the stigma, she says. PSI and other AIDS prevention efforts have used many tools to take the mass media message to a personal level.