Band members marched into the conference room with their instruments and proceeded to play their song, "I Do What I Want, But I Know What I'm Doing."
"Kate blew us away," says Michael Holscher, managing director for the Romanian arm of Population Services International, a nonprofit that was funding the ad campaign and runs health programs in more than 60 countries.
Kate Roberts, who once promoted soft drinks and cigarettes to youth, has enlisted pop stars to promote safe sex.
(Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
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In short order, she and Holscher produced two award-winning TV commercials, a weekly series on Romania's leading TV network, a documentary on a music television station and a concert for 10,000 young people, Holscher says. They commissioned a corps of peer educators known as the "Love Police," who approached young people during the summer holidays at Black Sea resorts and issued fake "citations" to those not carrying condoms. The Holograf song went on to become Romania's song of the year.
"The result of all this was a dramatic increase in healthy behavior among young Romanians during the first two years of our campaign," Holscher says. "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control documented a 43 percent increase in condom use among young women at first sex nationally."
None of this, he says, would have happened without Roberts, who got access to millions of dollars in free air time.
As Roberts worked on the account, she found herself thinking more about her other work -- peddling candy and cigarettes. Without making a conscious decision, she began working more on the pro bono account than she did for her paying clients.
She still loved the thrill of the limelight, but something was gnawing at her.
A Change of Heart
It was 1999 and Roberts was on a rare vacation, sitting in a tiny mud hut bar "in the middle of nowhere" outside Cape Town. She and her banker boyfriend were touring the country's vineyards, lush countryside and wild animal parks. She had three weeks to relax but found that she couldn't.
"I was very unsettled in the fact that I was doing advertising work," she says. "I felt bad about pushing kids to smoke cigarettes and drink soda pop and eat candy. I had done it for a very long time and I was really soul-searching about the meaning of my life."
Both the beauty and the sorrow of South Africa affected her greatly. She had seen terrible poverty in other places. But in South Africa, there seemed to be "a funeral on every corner."
Roberts stood up from her seat in the hut and walked over to a South African couple. She introduced herself and asked them to describe the biggest problem facing the country.
"It is quite simple," she says they told her. "It is AIDS, and it is killing a third of the continent." Roberts sat down, astonished. She knew from her work in Romania that the disease was affecting Africa, but she had not realized the scope of the problem.
With her boyfriend gaping at her, she began talking, but not to him.
"I suddenly said to myself, 'Are these Gucci shoes what life is all about? . . . I have probably sold a billion sticks of cigarettes and encouraged kids to drink pop and eat all that rubbish that I have promoted. I now see kids in Africa with absolutely nothing but disease and death around them.' "
She began thinking about what motivated her to get up every morning: fashion, travel, music, her work pitching companies for business so that she could earn money to buy more nice things.
"I could not believe I had been this person for such a long time," she says. "I don't want to say I was reborn, because I am not that religious, but something happened and I felt that I needed to refocus my energy and efforts to give back.
"I suddenly realized that I was 30 years old and a third of the way through my life and had nothing to show for it. I wanted to be able to die and say that I had made some sort of difference, even if it was saying that I had saved one life."
At the end of this internal monologue, Roberts looked at her boyfriend and declared, "I'm going to stop AIDS."
