The most extraordinary media campaign in South African history has been the multi-million rand billboard blitz mounted by the world’s most cash flush Aids organisation, loveLife.
LoveLife insists that the object of the billboards, on which it lavishes R13 million a year (most Aids NGOs consider themselves lucky if they get R200 000 a year in toto), is to reduce the HIV infection rate among the youth by getting them to change their sexual behaviour.
Indeed, when it launched in 1999 loveLife stated that it would do a lot more than merely reduce the prevalence rate. It would halve it. Within five years. Almost four years down the line there are no measurable signs that this has happened.
In fact the only measurable change since the billboards started going up is an increase in the rate of transactional sex among teenagers.
This kind of sex is not to be confused with the ‘survival” sex of prostitutes.
Transactional sex is what more and more relatively well-heeled young women, many of them at university and tech, are practising with older men in return for jewellery, designer clothes, cell phones, smart cars and other material goodies made desirable by the loveLife billboards.
Dr Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala of the University of Natal says transactional sex is ‘a growing trend” and that ‘conspicuous consumption (not financial need) is a central motivating factor.”
There is no ‘scientific” evidence linking this trend to the loveLife media campaign, she says. But the kind of lifestyle that is held up to young people in loveLife’s billboards and publications as desirable is precisely what young women are having transactional sex in order to access.
Another characteristic of transactional sex is that it is practised with many different partners, so bang goes another loveLife assertion that its billboards encourage young people to have sex in ‘stable, long-lasting relationships”.
The only measurable evidence we have is that they don’t.
As for the link between transactional sex and Aids, the fact that Leclerc-Madlala chose to present her findings at the recent Aids conference in Durban was not fortuitous.
Over and above such implied criticism of the loveLife billboards there has been the overt kind.
NGOs and church groups working at the sharp end of the epidemic for a fraction of what loveLife spend on their billboards confess that they can’t for the life of them see how flashy posters of good-looking young things in seductive poses and various states of undress are supposed to reduce HIV infection.
Social commentator Christine Qunta has attacked the billboards for subliminal racism (because they imply that blacks are randy) and for hyping a lifestyle that is alien to African culture.
Advertising guru Peter Vundla of Herdbuoys has criticised them for being ‘much too extravagant” and for ‘not being about changing sexual behaviour” as far as he could make out.
LoveLife has gone to great pains to explain to them, and others who just don’t get it, the underlying message of the billboards.
But they seem to have missed the point. If the Quntas and Vundlas of this country can’t see the message without being coached, then how the hell are the young teenagers they’re aimed at supposed to decode it?
Now loveLife has launched a new round of billboards. And if the last lot were enigmatic, then this batch are totally bewildering.
A billboard in Empire Road, Johannesburg, for example, shows an open box of chocolates. The best that can be said for it is that not even Claudia Braude will find subliminal racism here.
Nor, however, will she find anything else unless she reads the loveLife website. Here one finds explanations of the billboard messages that are at least as tortured as anything in the programme notes at the Tate Gallery in London.
‘This creative puts mutual respect at the centre of interpersonal relationships”, it says about the chocolate billboard.
Whether or not that’s intelligible to you, is beside the point. If billboards costing millions cannot stand alone, then it’s money wasted.
The plea of loveLife’s head of communications, Angela Stewart-Buchanan, that ‘the billboards must not be seen in isolation”, is an admission of failure.
They’re ‘complemented” by its publications and TV and radio shows, she says.
All this does is raise another contentious issue, which is the extent to which the SABC and major media groups have been bought by loveLife.
In return for R20 million a year in advertising the Sunday Times (which publishes its Scamto publication), the Independent Group (thethaNathi) and the SABC have signed contracts prohibiting them from publishing material that will harm the loveLife image.
Rhodes University journalism head Guy Berger has seen the contracts and believes they have ‘unhealthy” implications.
Indeed. How many newspapers and TV/radio stations have explored research showing that loveLife’s much vaunted branded lifestyle philosophy is creating ugly class divisions among township youth and breaking up families?
The only (superficially) critical pieces about loveLife have been in Noseweek, Fair Lady magazine and The Citizen. To be fair, the Sunday Times has published one or two querulous letters, but that falls a long way short of the kind of critical examination loveLife requires.
Why?
Well, for a start because it gets R25 million a year from South African taxpayers (in addition to R175 million a year from American funders and a recently-announced R30 million from Anglo American) who therefore have a right to know that the money is not being wasted on banal billboards.
How, for instance, does loveLife wind up getting so much from the government without a tender process being followed and without other NGOs getting a chance to put in a bid?
LoveLife head Dave Harrison blames the tall poppy syndrome for what little criticism of loveLife there has been. Other NGOs (scared to criticise loveLife openly because they’ll lose what little government funding they get) are just jealous of loveLife’s success, he suggests.
What success, asks Warren Parker, the head of Aids research organisation Cadre? Success in accessing public money, for sure.
‘The kind of money loveLife has accessed has not been available to other organisations,” he says.
‘And they’re pissing it away.”
Chris Barron is a freelance journalist.