The Fairy PrEP Mother PSA was created in response to the high rates of HIV in South Africa and the need to generate awareness of Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). South Africa has the largest HIV epidemic in the world, with 7.6 million people living with HIV. There is an adult prevalence rate of 17.8% and young people are at even greater risk, accounting for one-third of all new infections. However, the means to curb these alarming rates are in our hands. This includes PrEP, a medicine, widely available in South Africa, which reduces your risk of getting HIV to almost zero. With sufficient awareness and uptake, PrEP could prevent thousands of new infections every year.
MTV Shuga is a huge youth brand in South Africa. Our content attracts millions of viewers every season and is proven to stimulate a host of critical social and health outcomes, including awareness and uptake of emerging health modalities such as PrEP. Building on our established brand, audiences, and our proven impact model, in 2024 we launched the Fairy PrEP Mother Public Service Announcement (PSA). Through the PSA, we aimed to reach young South Africans at scale and, through the entertaining, youth-relevant, comedic short-form content, stimulate awareness, demand, and uptake of PrEP.
The strategy for the PSA was to communicate the importance of protecting oneself from HIV in a simple, engaging fashion. The format was to be sex-positive, funny, cheeky, and direct. By centering comedy, happiness, and joy, we sought to make a challenging subject more accessible and non-threatening, while making the PSA stand out in a market where a lot of youth sexual health/HIV campaigns are driven by shame and shock. Ultimately, we believe in trusting young people to make safe decisions for themselves when given accurate, trustworthy information, and we aimed to do that in a way that was engaging and relevant to them.
We also leveraged the popularity of MTV Shuga to deliver this content. MTV Shuga is highly established in South Africa, with audiences of multiple million. The PSA was branded as MTV Shuga content and we cast two MTV Shuga characters (Chidera Nwoha, who plays Khenzo; and Palesa Mothopi, who plays Vuvu). In addition, we cast Farieda, who is a popular youth influencer and a VJ on MTV Base, to play the character of The Fairy PreP Mother. By casting popular, recognizable youth figures in the PSA, combined with the trusted MTV Shuga, we sought to attract large audiences, while simultaneously facilitating faith in the content.
As well as utilizing the MTV Shuga brand, we also leveraged two additional structures to maximize the PSA’s reach and effectiveness.
We referenced the chatbot at the end of the PSA, ensuring that audiences were able to access additional information about PrEP (and broader prevention methodologies), including where to access the product.
The Fairy PreP Mother PSA was intended to raise awareness of the drug and to lead our audience to the Sister Unathi chatbot (which operates on the myprep.co.za website).
Between July 2023 – July 2024, 856 (13%) users self-reported that they had heard about Sister Unathi from MTV Shuga. The audience that visited the chatbot the most in the period was women above the age of 25 (2025 users) and 1777 men within the same age range.
These were the top 4 questions asked proving that the video was successful in inspiring interest in learning more and reaching out for credible information.
The Fairy PreP mother PSA received more than 7.5K views on YouTube with a reach of more than 88K when boosted in project-specific sites
