Background
With $70 million from its landmark settlement with the tobacco industry, the State of Florida launched the Florida Tobacco Pilot Program in 1998—the nation’s first anti-tobacco education program funded with tobacco industry money. The creative approach of the program’s “truth” marketing campaign is driven by young people, who help design and implement campaign activities that empower them to rebel against the tobacco industry and its deceptive marketing practices. The “truth” campaign is designed to create an anti-tobacco brand that appeals to teens the way the major tobacco brands do.
The main challenge the program faced was how the government could tell today’s teenagers to reject tobacco use. The answer, we’ve found, is that it can’t. Teens listen to other teens, and the State of Florida program has asked them to make this fight their own, giving teenagers a leadership role in the cutting-edge “truth” campaign.
Approach
Porter Novelli oversees Marketing and Communications for the program, in conjunction with Crispin Porter + Bogusky, a Miami-based advertising agency. We help create and implement youth advocacy and outreach efforts, as well as local and national media activities.
The campaign was developed during a four-day Teen Tobacco Summit in Haines City, Florida in March 1998, which brought together over 600 teenagers from across the state to give input on the campaign design. The teens created the major advertising theme, “truth,” developed and ranked anti-tobacco curricula, established a youth advocacy group (Students Working Against Tobacco, or SWAT) and refined an enforcement strategy against underage tobacco sales.
Young people involved in the Summit and SWAT guide the advertising strategy, have appeared in some of the campaign advertising and take a leadership role in developing every aspect of the program.
Less than two weeks after the Summit, the Pilot Program launched a $25 million advertising campaign with two television spots filmed at the Summit. In the ensuing years, ad themes have ranged from an awards show set in Hell—where the award for most deaths in a year goes to a tobacco executive—to a search for the Marlboro Man at Philip Morris headquarters. The campaign’s advertising uses the same production values and edgy humor that commercial marketers use to reach young people. Tapping into teens’ need to rebel, the campaign shows tobacco use as an addictive habit marketed by an adult establishment. More than 70 television commercials, radio spots and print ads have run since the April, 1998 launch.
The program web site (www.wholetruth.com) based on ideas from the Summit, contains facts and statistics on cigarettes and chewing tobacco, information on how to join SWAT, and updates on Pilot Program activities.
Youth advocacy activities reinforce the theme of rebellion and provide an appealing media angle:
· Recognizing the powerful influence that Hollywood has on the behavior of teens, SWAT developed the Reel “truth” to target the entertainment industry and its unrealistic depiction of tobacco use. After SWAT teens mailed over 20,000 postcards to celebrities in Hollywood, several stars, including supermodel Christy Turlington, talk show host Leeza Gibbons and Melrose Place star Antonio Sabato, Jr., publicly pledged their support.
· The summer 1998 “truth” Tour featured a 10-day, 13-city whistle stop train tour and concert series across the state of Florida. Governor Lawton Chiles rode the train, joining the teen spokespeople who conducted their own press conferences at every stop. SWAT members also trained their peers in advocacy and media relations along the way, empowering teens throughout the state to join in the movement’s rebellion against the tobacco industry.
· During fall 1999, SWAT took on tobacco magazine advertising with “Big Tobacco on the Run.” SWAT members tore cigarette ads from the magazines they read, plastering them with a neon-orange “Rejected. Rebuffed. Returned.” sticker and mailing them to tobacco company CEOs along with a request to meet with SWAT to discuss youth marketing guidelines. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation accepted the invitation and sent a representative to meet with the SWAT Board of Directors.
Results
Two years after the program began, a survey of 20,000 Florida teens showed a significant decline in tobacco use among them. From February 1998 to February 2000, the number of teens defined as current smokers dropped by 54 percent among middle school students and by 24 percent among high schoolers. President Clinton stated that “Promising new results from the youth anti-smoking program launched (in Florida)…show why every state should have a comprehensive program to reduce youth smoking…” And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “the decline of teen smoking in Florida…is the largest annual reported decline observed in this nation since 1980.”
Porter Novelli’s efforts were instrumental in driving this behavior change. We were able to touch the minds and hearts of a generation of Floridians with a youth-driven strategic public relations campaign, involving media relations, youth advocacy, and engaging grassroots activities. Only nine months after the inception of the campaign, more than 92% of Florida teens were aware of “truth”, and key anti-tobacco attitudes were shifting in the right direction.
The media coverage of the campaign has helped to position Florida as a model for state anti-tobacco programs. PN’s media relations outreach has resulted in more than 845 million media impressions, including stories on ABC’s Good Morning America, the CBS Evening News Eye on America, 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday News This Morning, CNN, and network affiliates throughout the state of Florida, as well as television coverage on outlets in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and elsewhere. Print coverage has included The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, Seventeen and Teen People as well as every major market Florida newspaper and numerous minority outlets.
Porter Novelli has received a number of awards for its work on the “truth” campaign, including the “Silver Anvil Award of Excellence” from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), “Best External Public Relations Program” and “Best of Show” from the PRSA National Capital Chapter, “Health Care Campaign of the Year” from PR Week, and the Gold CIPRA (Creativity in Public Relations Awa
