I would suggest you first look at how gay-orientated media and gay-targetting ads reinforces existing stereotypes. They do that because it works and thought I see many problems with re-inforcing stereotypes to the point it becomes sickening reading a gay mag, if in this case it comes with a benefit, this is something we could live with.

But for sure, PC campaigns are doomed to fail as they will not appaal to those they are supposed to reach.

vb
roger

Personally (and this digresses from your point), I would pair ads like these with others demonstrating all available care and support for low-income people both in and outside of high-risk groups who have tested positive. The dominant belief in a lot of health campaigns has long been that scare tactics are the most effective way to influence behavior, but as the life expectancy of HIV patients with current medicine increases to normal levels, it’s becoming more  important to get people into the system and treated early than to keep them so terrified of the disease that they avoid testing. Concerns that the relative livability of HIV is making people complacent about it are valid, but not nearly as worrisome as the impact that lack of stable access to health care is when it comes to health decisions.

The exception was the relatively obscure Medical Anthropology Quarterly, which had some exhaustive research into how factors of poverty (which disproportionately affects blacks and Latinos in the US) increases the risk of exposure to HIV and of being diagnosed after one has exposed other sex partners to it.  Every major variable – access to health care, level of education completed, time spent in prison, time spent as a sex worker – led us back to the fact that low-income people were both likelier to contract HIV and likelier to maintain a highly infectious viral load due to lack of medical care. Race did overlap with some of those details – particularly time spent in prison, which is drastically higher for black men than other groups – but it was never the whole story.

The media of the time, just as now, did an enormous disservice to the science by artificially detaching race from class. Some outlets even went so far as to speculate on the reasons for a spike in black infection rates (all of which were based on stereotypes, such as the idea of black promiscuity, that did not correspond with any available data on sexual behavior). Inadvertently, one thing they did accomplish was deepening the AIDS stigma within some minority communities, to the extent that some of the people we interviewed avoiding condom use out of fear that their partners would think that meant they had HIV. 

Hearing this coming out of the mouths of young people without health insurance was heartbreaking.

I don’t necessarily object to the strategies attempted by the campaigns cited above, but I don’t find people in AIDS charities to be in any way delusional about what they’re up against. They know that universal health care access, more affordable antiretrovirals, better sex education, and economic strategies to lift more people out of poverty would achieve far better results across the board in public health. But these are broad systemic failures far beyond the capacity of small nonprofits to deal with. The best they can really do is try to target minority groups as persuasively as possible without a Madison Avenue budget or the full support of a government that has always dragged its feet on HIV/AIDS and neglected the health impact of the vast and growing income gap.

I disagree with you. Be that as it may: How would you have wanted the campaign?