@Article{info:doi/10.2196/52842,
author="Shah, Harita S
and Serrano, Pedro Alonso
and Phillips II, Gregory",
title="Adaptation and Reach of a Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis Social Marketing Campaign for Latino, Latina, and Latinx Populations: Development Study",
journal="JMIR Form Res",
year="2024",
month="Jul",
day="17",
volume="8",
pages="e52842",
keywords="Latino; Latinx; Latina; social marketing; social media; PrEP; pre-exposure prophylaxis; HIV prevention; community; CBPR; community-based participatory research; campaign; transgender; MSM; reach; HIV; prevention; formative research; men who have sex with men; treatment; intervention; biomedical; awareness; Latino/x/a; Latina/x/o",
abstract="Background: Latino, Latina, and Latinx (Latino/a/x) individuals remain disproportionately impacted by HIV, particularly sexual minority men and transgender women. Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an effective means of biomedical HIV prevention, but awareness and uptake remain low among marginalized Latino/a/x populations. Social marketing campaigns have demonstrated promise in promoting PrEP in other populations but are poorly studied in Latino/a/x sexual minority men and transgender women. Objective: This study aims to (1) adapt and pilot a PrEP social marketing campaign tailored to Latino/a/x populations with a focus on sexual minority men and transgender women through community-based participatory research (CBPR) and (2) evaluate the reach and ad performance of the adapted PrEP social marketing campaign. Methods: We used the ADAPT-ITT (assessment, decision, adaptation, production, topical experts-integration, training, and testing) framework for adapting evidence-based interventions for new settings or populations. This paper presents how each phase of the ADAPT-ITT framework was applied via CBPR to create the PrEP{\'a}rate (``Be PrEPared'') campaign. Key community engagement strategies included shared ownership with community partners, focus groups to guide content, crowdsourcing to name the campaign, design by local Latino/a/x artists, and featuring local influencers as the faces of PrEP{\'a}rate. We evaluated campaign reach and advertisement performance using social media platform metrics (paid and organic reach, impressions, unique clicks, and click-through rates [CTR]) and website use statistics from Google Analytics. Results: The PrEP{\'a}rate campaign ran in Cook County, Illinois, from April to September 2022. The campaign reached over 118,750 people on social media (55,750 on Facebook and Instagram [Meta Platforms Inc] and 63,000 on TikTok [ByteDance Ltd]). The Meta ads performed over the industry benchmark with ads featuring local transgender women (2{\%} CTR) and cisgender sexual minority men (1.4{\%} CTR). Of the different Grindr (Grindr Inc) ad formats piloted, the interstitial Grindr ads were the highest performing (1183/55,479, 2.13{\%} CTR). YouTube (Google) ads were low performing at 0.11{\%} (153/138,337) CTR and were stopped prematurely, given limits on sexual education--related content. In the first year, there were 5006 visitors to the website. Conclusions: Adaptation of an existing evidence-based intervention served as an effective method for developing a PrEP social marketing campaign for Latino/a/x audiences. CBPR and strong community partnerships were essential to tailor materials and provide avenues to systematically address barriers to PrEP access. Social marketing is a promising strategy to promote PrEP among underserved Latino/a/x populations. ",
issn="2561-326X",
doi="10.2196/52842",
url="https://formative.jmir.org/2024/1/e52842",
url="https://doi.org/10.2196/52842",
url="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/39018099"
}