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Background: Teen cigarette smoking is at a historic low of 6 percent in the U.S., but the Surgeon General has warned that 5.6 million American children alive today will die prematurely of tobacco-related illness. With marked progress reducing tobacco use among young people, the award-winning truth® campaign faced the challenge of how to stay relevant amidst generational and cultural changes that threatened to undermine its fundamental strengths and the brand equity that earned it recognition from AdWeek in 2009 as Campaign of the Decade[i].
Program background: With the national teen smoking rate below 10 percent and primary research that confirmed that today’s young people (Gen Z) didn’t see smoking or the tobacco industry to be a problem, the team behind the truth campaign took a step back to reposition and re-introduce the brand. The strategic shift included rethinking the campaign’s core audience, revamping its messaging and reprioritizing its media delivery channels. The new campaign strategy aimed to adopt a social norms approach among teens that enlisted support from the majority who don’t smoke to influence those teens at risk for the behavior.
Evaluation Methods and Results: A multi-faceted evaluation approach tracked real-time metrics such as video views and engagement on social media and longer-term milestones such as campaign awareness and receptivity, issue knowledge and attitudes and behavior change. Youth and young adults exposed to truth ads are almost 2.5x more likely to agree with anti-tobacco attitudes and 70 percent less likely to smoke cigarettes in the next 12 months. Advertising awareness is at the CDC benchmark of 75 percent and our evaluation indicates significant associations between campaign awareness and changes in targeted attitudes and intentions not to smoke, including a dose-response effect.
Conclusions: The reimagination of the truth campaign with an audience-focused approach helped to reinvigorate the brand and introduce it to a new generation. Core to this change was creating a social movement by connecting tobacco use to the things—dating, pets, money, and social justice—that teens care about most. Tactical changes to implement the strategy included a mix of traditional and new media elements, including paid advertising, social media, online influencer engagement, and a renewed emphasis on public relations. A key element of the new approach was linking new ad launches to signature events that attract large youth audiences such as The Grammy Awards and MTV’s Video Music Awards.
Implications for research and/or practice: Truth Initiative faced a confluence of factors—like those faced by other youth-focused public health campaigns—when considering how to evolve its truth youth prevention campaign for a new generation. The future success of the brand depended on carefully navigating the generational shift from Gen X to Gen Z and recognizing and adjusting for changes in technology and media consumption habits. The evolution also accounted for overall landscape, including the introduction of new tobacco products and finding a niche among partner’s new anti-tobacco campaigns.