Malaria Ad to Air During Olympic Opening Ceremony
This just in, more details to follow…
“ExxonMobil’s latest effort to heighten awareness of malaria will come through the first-ever corporate television ad focused on malaria. You can view the ad at: www.exxonmobil.com/olympics_malaria. ”
“The ad will appear on NBC during the opening ceremonies and throughout the highly anticipated summer Olympic Games in Beijing – where, as you may know, of the approximately 205 countries competing, more than half have malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The advocacy ad encourages viewers to visit Roll Back Malaria’s Web site http://www.rbm.who.int/donate.html), where they can learn how to join the global fight against malaria.”
Thanks to Pam for this information. I’ll post more on this later
Global Health Ideas 
[…] Malaria Ad to Air During Olympic Opening Ceremony […]
The Good: Olympic Global Health Ad and The Bad:Olympic Ethnic/Economic Cleansing? « Technology, Health & Development
August 12, 2008 at 8:17 pm
I think its great that a large corporation is taking iniative and becoming involved in creating a public health campaign to increase awarenss of Malaria. Althouhg medicinal treatment is important, I hope that ExxonMobil will become more heavily involved with the prevention side of things and distributing bed nets to all those that need them. Education is also a huge part of defeating diseases in areas with endemic Malaria. This is exciting that this ad will be run during the olympics and I hope it will be a wake up call to all those who see it.
Jes Hansen
August 11, 2008 at 8:14 pm
I’ve seen the ad twice already (during the opening ceremonies and again today.) It’s great to see Exxon Mobil spending as much as $750,000 to promote its social responsibility efforts around malaria. What’s even better is that Steven Phillips – who appears in the commercial – makes it a point to say that malaria isn’t just a CSR initiative for Exxon. Rather, it’s a business continuity issue – if Exxon’s workers are sick, the company loses money. Having a productive workforce is serious business, and Exxon appears to be serious about large scale malaria prevention activities, including insecticide-treated net distribution and even indoor residual spraying…
Rob Katz
August 9, 2008 at 4:50 pm
[…] Mahad Ibrahim at Technology, Health and Development informs us that one of the ads catching millions of eyeballs during NBC’s Olympics coverage will be ExxonMobil’s spot raising awareness about malaria. […]
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