TV "Roadblock" Serves AIDS Fight

At precisely 7:59 p.m. on Sunday, a group of about 100 cable outlets voluntarily showed "Kids," a 30-second AIDS awareness commercial. This Madison Avenue version of a television "roadblock" intended to force a large number of viewers to watch the commercial. "The idea was that you can't change the channels to miss the message," says Steve Villano, CEO of Cable Positive, the New York nonprofit cable and telecommunications industry AIDS action group that organized the roadblock.

The ad features the voice of Michael Douglas. As somber music plays, AIDS orphans walk the streets alone and try to get through life's daily tasks without adults. Douglas equates the 14 million children orphaned by AIDS with every child under the age of five in America. "AIDS is preventable. Apathy is lethal," the ad warns.

"The spot was moving for our viewers," says Carole Black, CEO of Lifetime Entertainment Services, which has two cable networks aimed largely at women. Cable Positive provided the spot to the cable networks, such as Lifetime, Discovery, the Food Network and SoapNET, through a satellite feed. Villano estimates that 35 million to 50 million cable television households saw the AIDS message during the roadblock Sunday night.

The creative content of the "Kids" ad is sponsored by the UN Foundation in partnership with the Advertising Council, a nonprofit that in 1988 was one of the first organizations to use the word "condom" in a commercial for AIDS awareness.

"Kids" is the primary vignette in a broader AIDS campaign. AOL Time Warner has agreed to place some of the ads prominently in its media properties. Julie Hughes, director of outreach at the UN Foundation, said she hopes network and cable outlets will continue to show the ads in the coming months.

On average, only 0.4 percent of airtime goes to public service announcements, and 43 percent of those commercials are presented between midnight and 6 a.m., according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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