The message is straightforward: Goal in Your Head – Protection and excitement must go together. As for the objective, it is clear: to help gays and bisexual men become aware of the risk that having sex without a condom poses to their health.
Meta na Sua Cabeça is an action carried out by the NGO Estruturação – Grupo LGBT de Brasília, with 17 years of existence, in partnership with the dating site Available.com, the largest in Brazil of its kind. This December 1, 2010, the initiative, which was launched three years earlier, enters a new phase and presents unprecedented actions.
The first characteristic of the new Meta na Sua Cabeça is its duration, explains Welton Trindade, creator of the project and director of Estruturação. "We are not going to launch a campaign and end up in demobilization. Meta na Sua Cabeça will be permanent. The gay and bisexual male community needs something like this. Enough of talking about AIDS only during Carnival and December 1st."
The new phase maintains proposals that were well evaluated in 2007, such as the question and answer section on STD/Aids, in which experts answer questions from Internet users, and the seasonal campaigns, which are renewed throughout the year.
Reach is a major differentiator of Meta na Sua Cabeça, says Sérgio Di Pietro, executive director of Infonet Business, which brings together the websites A Capa, Avail and Dykerama and the magazine A Capa. "We have half a million users. With Meta na Sua Cabeça, STD/AIDS prevention messages for this audience gain incredible reinforcement. This is part of how we see our customers. We don't just want to provide quality journalistic services and information, but also contribute to ensuring that the public is healthy and lives well."
Among the new features is the TV program "Meta na Sua Cabeça", which is part of the website The Cape. The attraction, biweekly, will bring the public interviews with STD/AIDS scholars with tips on prevention and debates about these diseases.
The video center is another attraction. "We see a lot of cool videos about STD/AIDS prevention on YouTube, but they are scattered. We're going to put them together on the Meta na Sua Cabeça website so that access is easy", says Trindade.
In the Group Sex section, Internet users will be able to reproduce the content of the prevention campaigns carried out by the initiative through banners. The codes will be open and anyone will be able to copy them to reproduce them on blogs, for example. The order is to disseminate information.
The motto of the first campaign of the new phase of Meta na Sua Cabeça is the fact that more than one in ten gays, bisexual men and other men who have sex with men (but who do not call themselves homosexuals, for example) in Brazil have HIV. Among male heterosexuals, this proportion is approximately 11 times lower (0,8 per 100).
"We discussed a lot in the Structuring and then with the Available.com about what tone we should take in campaigns and we saw that we can no longer let gays and bisexuals think that AIDS is something that doesn't deserve as much concern as it did in the 80s and 90s. It does! We have 11 times more AIDS than heterosexuals and we are, in Brazil, at least a third of the epidemic. Let's use shock to make this clear", says Trindade.
The campaign, through online banners, uses the possible doubts that a gay or bisexual male may have about whether or not to have safe sex. After informing the proportion of gay and bisexual men with HIV, the advertising piece ends with an inquisitive phrase: "Okay, you can decide." When clicking on the banner, the Internet user is taken to a text with explanations about the topic. It was created by designer Tagore Vilela, a volunteer at Estruturação.
Check out the premiere of "Meta na sua Cabeça" on TV A CAPA here.
