Traditional Versus Social Media: How the Truth® Campaign Reaches and Engages Youth

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis:  Social media has fundamentally changed the way that we receive, create, share and process information. In August 2014, Legacy premiered a new truth campaign called Finish IT, aiming to empower youth to be the generation that ends smoking.  In addition to television advertisements, the campaign strongly integrated social media as a tool for youth empowerment.

Methods:  This study presents an analysis of the social conversation surrounding the Finish IT campaign on the microblogging network of Twitter. Over two million tweets were collected from August through October 2014, spanning the duration of the first wave of the Finish IT campaign. Tweets were captured by using a list of 154 keyword rules which include words pertaining to the truth® campaign, Finish IT, specific campaign advertisements, and tobacco use more broadly. Tweets were cleaned for relevance to the campaign using multiple keyword filters and Boolean searches.  This produced a database of approximately 62,876 tweets relevant to Wave 1.  The amount of conversation was determined through an analysis of unique users reached, number of tweets and mentions, and keywords and hashtags.  Further, tweets were categorized by engagement that included direct, earned, organic and celebrity.

Results:  There were 37,470 users that tweeted about Finish IT.  Approximately 34,471 tweets were retweets. This accounted for over half (55%) the corpus.  On average, there were less than two tweets (1.68) per user.  The highest volume of tweets was the day of the MTV VMAs, with over 30,000 tweets.  The largest engagement category was organic at 37,309 tweets (63%).  This was followed by earned at 17,868 tweets (30%), celebrity at 2,705 tweets (.05%) and direct at 3 tweets (<.01%).  The campaign reached over 226,411,194 unique Twitter users.

Conclusions:  The first phase of the truth® Finish IT campaign resulted in a large volume of twitter conversation, much of it organic in nature.  Hijacking a cultural moment by premiering a spot about celebrities at the VMAs, in conjunction with paid promotions on social media during that time, successfully prompted a high volume of conversation about the campaign.  Celebrities have potential to drive conversation in ways that promote campaign messages (two of the top campaign-related retweets were by musicians Shawn Mendes and Travis Barker).  Including celebrities in an ad that calls out a negative behavior like smoking can promote push back from the celebrity’s fans, as in the case of a high volume of tweets in defense of Zayn Malik, a member of the band One Direction. However, this also has the effect of increasing conversation about smoking among the target demographic, which is a goal of the campaign.

Implications for research and/or practice:  Although the use of the internet and new media technologies has attracted the attention of many researchers and practitioners in the field of health communication, traditional media like television advertising remains a driving force for health messaging, particularly when employed in the context of a popular cultural media event. Social media engagement should be proactively utilized to enhance messages delivered via traditional media.