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Anti-smoking groups have been using scare tactics to get folks to quit smoking ever since the first Surgeon General's report linking smoking to cancer back in 1964, and usually it's something ugly like pictures of the lungs all blackened by smoke.
A classic of this sort ran in London last summer, posters that looked like an X-ray of a smoker's lungs that were placed over outdoor ashtrays. The lung portion of the poster was really a clear window, and looking in one could see the ashtray filling up with butts and ashes as people finished their cigarettes, creating a ghastly visual image of what one's lungs must look like after years of smoking.
A harsh message indeed. And that's the rub. Smokers already know smoking is a serious health risk.
So a new campaign for the same group, QUIT, is taking the entirely opposite approach. It is using the same venue, the outdoor ashtray, but the message is really a collection of conversations just long enough to be read while puffing down a smoke, maybe five minutes.
They are words on a page that could be dialogue from a novel.
And they are easy to read because the ashtrays, called Adbins, are mounted on walls, with the poster in a frame at eye level.
One conversation has an elderly couple getting engaged, another has an aging woman discovering a book she wrote in her youth will be published. Another is about a man becoming a grandfather.
The tagline: Life. It’s worth sticking around for.
"Our idea was to imagine the wonderful, life-changing things that can happen later in life," says Ant Melder, creative group head at Saatchi & Saatchi X, which created the campaign.
"Many smokers see quitting as giving up something, losing out on something. We wanted to get them to see quitting smoking is a massively positive thing to do, and by not quitting they could have much more to lose."
Why the simple text?
In these fast-paced technology-driven times, most people usually don't have the spare minutes to stop and read a piece of long copy. The exception is that person who ducks out of work for a quick smoke and a moment's reflection.
"The ashtrays are the perfect media because they address smokers at ‘point-of-puff,’ when they have five minutes to read the copy, consider the message and, potentially, take out their mobile phone and call the Quitline," he says.
The out-of-home campaign launched on Dec. 18 and will run through January in London. The agency’s next goal is to secure more funding so the campaign can be rolled out nationwide.
