Truth Anti-Smoking Campaign - Florida, USA

This marketing campaign, which used teen input in every phase of its development, included 33 television commercials, seven billboards, eight print ads, and four posters. The ads depicted real teenagers taking on the tobacco industry at the Teen Tobacco Summit and statewide Students Working Against Tobacco (SWAT) functions. In order to engage teens, the campaign incorporated a variety of in-your-face styles, using everything from edgy humour to high technology. In addition to advertisements, efforts included:

• The creation of an FTPP website to offer facts and statistics on tobacco, SWAT information, and online advocacy activities;
• programme sponsorship;
• merchandise like t-shirts, baseball caps, and lanyards distributed via an offical campaign van at teen functions;
• youth advocacy groups; and
• the enlistment of celebrities and politicians to encourage petitioning of the entertainment industry to portray smoking more accurately and to denormalize its use.

With these efforts, programme organisers hoped to make the "Truth" into a credible brand name easily recognized by the campaign's target audience. The product/action was being cool by attacking adults who want to manipulate teens to smoke. The campaign reduced the price of the behaviour (attacking adults) by selecting adults everyone agreed had been manipulating them. Ads asked youth to directly confront the tobacco industry and publicise this teen activism in the popular media. The campaign routinely carried out surveys of its target audience that allowed the campaign to discover important micro-market segments (south Florida Hispanics) where impacts were lagging.

Health, Youth.

On August 25, 1997, the State of Florida won a landmark victory against the Tobacco Industry worth $11.3 billion over twenty-five years (increased to $13 billion a year later). In addition to a number of other concessions, the settlement included a clause providing an earmarked budget of $200 million for a state-run pilot programme to fight youth tobacco use: FTPP, or "Truth".

As the campaign was beginning to take shape in the fall of 1997, tobacco use among high school students had reached more than 36 percent nationwide, an increase of one-third since 1991. Research findings that same year showed that 70.2 percent of high school teens had tried smoking and that 35.8 percent of that group would continue smoking on a daily basis. Surveys also indicated that 86 percent of teen smokers routinely purchased one of the three most advertised tobacco brands.

A comprehensive review of previous anti-tobacco campaigns by the FTPP confirmed that past prevention strategies were ineffective and outdated. Teens were already well-acquainted with the negative effects of tobacco use and didn't consider smoking a significant issue in the context of their lives. Furthermore, research showed that, despite their knowledge and awareness, teens still saw smoking as rebellious and self-identifying.

The FTPP determined that, in order to reach teens, they would ultimately have to drive a wedge between the tobacco industry's advertising and their target audience. Initially, because of a clause in the state's settlement, the campaign was restricted from directly attacking the tobacco industry. This challenge was overcome by focusing the campaign on the supporters of tobacco in the advertising and publishing industries, a tactic that received considerable attention in the national media and inspired other prevention programmes. The "Truth" campaign had repositioned tobacco control as a hip, rebellious youth movement with the message that tobacco use is an addictive drug marketed by a callous adult-establishment. The campaign has had initial success: From 1998 to 2000, the percent of Florida middle schoolers who smoked cigarettes in the past 30 days fell from 18.5 to 8.6 percent, while the percentage for high schoolers dropped from 27.4 to 20.9.