Marketing to a Diverse Audience Award Winner
The tobacco industry spends $10.5 billion a year promoting their products. And it works. Every day 4,000 kids start smoking. And every day, 1,200 Americans die from it, making it the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Beyond health consequences, tobacco costs the U.S. more than $96 billion in healthcare expenses and $97 billion in lost productivity every year.
Arnold Worldwide’s challenge was to combat all of those numbers with the use of one campaign; because they knew those numbers were people. The strategy was not to focus on “smoking will kill you,” but rather on living your life with a smoking-related illness. After all, for every person who dies from tobacco use, another 20 Americans continue to suffer with at least one serious tobacco-related illness.
The developed campaign features people who have tobacco-related diseases. These people give viewers “Tips” on how do deal with everyday life should their continued smoking give them the same disease. The ads don’t tell anyone not to smoke. Instead, they simply show people what could happen if they do, and give them a helpful tip to deal with it. Of course they also offer a “You can quit” call to action, with direction to call a quit line or visit their website for tips on how to do so, always leaving the decision up to the viewer.
The tobacco industry has long targeted specific groups with their marketing. To make real change in the nation’s smoking rates, CDC’s Tips From Former Smokers campaign needed to target these groups as well. Knowing this, CDC featured African-American, Native-American, Native-Alaskan, Latino, Caucasian and gay and lesbian men and women in the ads.
The appeal to diversity has gone beyond race, color, religion, geographic region and sexual orientation though. Arnold also targeted people who have specific diseases and handicaps/challenges because of those diseases. They have featured people with tracheotomy holes in their throats and missing fingers, toes, feet and limbs. They’ve featured wheelchair-bound stroke victims, those who’ve lost sight in one eye, and those missing teeth, jaws or lungs. By reaching out to diverse groups, they knew they were far more likely to get to entrenched smokers in those groups to call the quit line or go to the website to get that free help.
This was the first smoking cessation campaign championed by the federal government since the 1949 introduction of the Fairness Doctrine. During the first three months of the campaign, 79.7% of smokers in the United States reported seeing any ad, and when it was active on national media channels, call volume to the national quit line nearly tripled while the website saw its activity quadruple. During the most recent round of work, a total of 352,848 calls to 1-800-QUIT-NOW occurred and nearly 2.9 million unique visitors accessed the “Tips” campaign website. A later study published in The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, proved that the increase in quit line and website activity resulted in 1.6 million people attempting to quit smoking. An additional 220,000 people quit immediately, and more than 100,000 people permanently quit because of this campaign.
