Put smoking behind you

How real stories and emotional authenticity are helping to reduce smoking-related deaths and ill health in the North East.

The challenge

Despite a large fall in smoking rates since 2005¹, smoking is still the single biggest cause of cancer and ill health in the North East. It costs nearly £1 billion a year in medical, health and social care, lost earnings and smoking-related unemployment.

We were briefed to create a campaign that increases awareness of the harms and impact of smoking, but also highlights the benefits of quitting and signposts the support available. 

Ultimately, to make smokers believe there’s reason to give quitting a go.

Our solution

Through research, we learnt that our NE smokers value hearing from “people like me”. They appreciate the rawness, truth and emotional authenticity of people from their own communities.

So we shared real stories from people directly affected by smoking. Each with a heartfelt appeal to smokers to “put smoking behind you”.

We develop a multi-channel media approach, with broadcast TV at its core.

Results

Tracked awareness, perceptions and intentions to quit have proven very successful compared with other benchmarked quit campaigns.

of the regions’ smokers recalled the campaign 

of those took a quit-related smoking action

¹ONS Annual Population Survey