Hasta La Creative!

We’ve previously spotted the AIDS Healthcare Foundation Free STD check “Bernie” logo spoof on billboards in Los Angeles, where it resided at the corner of Sunset and Van Ness for a while, as well as prominent streets like Vine St. and Santa Monica Blvd., Century Blvd and La Cienega. Now the campaign has begun taking over the New York City subway poster sites.

“Senator Sanders’ powerful message resonates with a lot of Americans, particularly young people,” Jason Farmer, senior creative director at the AHF, said in a press release. “We hope that our lighthearted – but highly important – billboard campaign for STD testing will as well.”

The subway posters went up last week and the tagline on each posters leads to the freestdcheck.com website, but the logo looks deceptively like Bernie Sanders campaign logo and a variant of Bernie Sanders slogan. I’m a little surprised that FreeSTDCheck.com haven’t met some legal issues yet, but I suppose it falls under “parody”, despite being obvious commercial speech.

Another controversial billboard from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation was the “Tinder & Grindr” one, which Tinder demanded they remove it as it insinuated STD’s were spread via the app. Tinder sent a cease & desist; “These unprovoked and wholly unsubstantiated accusations are made to irreparably damage Tinder’s reputation in an attempt to encourage others to take an HIV test offered by your organization”.

But the AHF were unphrased and responded: “Rather than trying to chill AHF’s public health message by threatening AHF with frivolous lawsuits, AHF urges Tinder to support its message of sexual health awareness by encouraging Tinder users to get tested for STIs and to get treated promptly if they have an infection.”