They feel nervous about being judged by the people behind the camera. He's rationalizing now, and he admits it. Pappas has been working in HIV prevention since 1984, and he knows how to grab a viewer's attention. The tenet that people will pay more attention to a pretty, scantily clad speaker than to a thoughtful, garbed, ordinary-looking pitchman or woman is an advertising article of faith. San Francisco is one of six cities that is getting federal money to do so-called prevention for positives, and the only one to have allocated funds for an ad that will be aired in prime time.
Heads are sure to turn.
Let's just hope the message gets as much attention as the muscle. It's been pulled together by two women living with HIV, Louise Binder and Janet Conners, co-chairs of the Canadian Treatments Advocates Council. Binder, a short, curvy woman with blond hair and funky, colored glasses, grabs a megaphone. Dying for it. A crowd lines the hotel's plush corridors, watching aloofly as they sip coffee.