Integrated Marketing and Pregnant Boys

If health communication campaigns are supposed to get your attention, this one does. For sure. I was browsing the staff side of the United Way Worldwide website and came across this campaign. This campaign was part of the One Milwaukee project which was partially funded and advised by the United Way of Greater Milwaukee. The One Milwaukee project website has some bad links, but, I was able to track down the agency who did this work: Serve.

Check out Serve's way of getting people to pay attention by watching the video available here.

Serve's took an integrated marketing campaign approach to decreasing the teen birth rate in Milwaukee. In addition to the 'pregnant boy' ad (targeted at business and community leaders/activists), as seen above, Serve used graffiti like messaging to get people to call a phone number. See the results of that campaign at the video below.

In addition, they used bathroom posters in girls high school bathrooms and various other tactics. It is an integrated campaign as they used multiple avenues to reach segmented audiences to not just encourage behavior change but support that change through business and community leader buy-in. This is a critical factor in Milwaukee's dropping teen pregnancy rates. In fact, "on November 18, 2008, public health officials announced that births among 15-17 year olds in Milwaukee had dropped to the lowest level in 28 years" according to the UW Milwaukee website.

Awesome job Serve and United Way Milwaukee. Your communication tactics coupled with research and community wide buy-in is enacting real change.