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Background: While tobacco use remains the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S., lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals are disproportionately impacted. LGBT young adults are nearly twice as likely to use tobacco as their non-LGBT peers. To address this disparity, this public education campaign was developed to prevent and reduce tobacco use among LGBT young adults. Leveraging critical insights from formative research, this campaign encourages LGBT young adults to live tobacco-free.
Program background: Conventional advertising plans often focus on achieving a desired number of impressions to motivate a consumer to purchase a product. However, social marketing campaigns seek to activate the processing centers in the audience’s brain to influence attitude, beliefs and perceptions that could ultimately lead to the desired behavior. This sort of change can be facilitated through active engagement, which is a two-way communication or conversation with the target audience. An innovative example of active engagement is through interactive digital experiences where audience members have an opportunity to engage via quizzes and other interactive formats that could ultimately encourage the target to become messengers among their social networks. By engaging members of the target audience directly within the digital spaces where they are active, interactive experiences can be an effective tool for influencing positive change among LGBT young adults who are traditionally hard-to-reach.
Evaluation Methods and Results: The campaign has an online presence supported by targeted media efforts (social, digital, print, out-of-home, and local events) in key U.S. markets. Prior to launch, primary and secondary research was conducted, including extensive literature review, subject matter expert review, and focus groups involving a diverse group of 18-24 LGBT participants (age, gender, race/ethnicity) Insights culled from the data were used to inform development of innovative messaging.
Conclusions: As part of the campaign’s engagement program, multiple interactive digital experiences were implemented. Collectively, the programs generated a significant amount of audience engagements through social and digital media and produced an increase in experience completions on the brand’s website. Thousands of LGBT young adults engaged with the brand through local events and these online programs.
Implications for research and/or practice:
This session will cover how to create interactive digital experiences that move beyond impressions and clicks to influence positive change among targeted, hard-to-reach audiences. Examples will highlight novel approaches for strengthening and amplifying digital experiences, such as integration with influencer marketing, social integration at events and active community management on social media. Bringing together in-market observations with key insights from formative research, participants will hear about the development of a targeted LGBT campaign and the use of innovative creative advertisements combined with behavior change strategies applied across traditional media, digital, social, interactive media, and local outreach, all intended to influence beliefs about tobacco use among LGBT young adults.