Finalist
#SmokeThis
Summary of work
Question… What industry makes more money than Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Microsoft combined? Answer… The tobacco industry.
Smoking is the biggest preventable cause of cancer. Cancer Research UK is committed to bringing the smoking prevalence rate to below 5% in the next twenty years. To do this, we need to address the root of the problem and tackle the pernicious influence of the tobacco industry.
#SmokeThis was a bold campaign with a bold aim – to engage young people with the underhand activities of an industry that is not on their radar and turn that apathy into action. With a simple, but strong visual protest at its heart, backed by an engaging and informative video, the campaign worked across multiple social media and digital channels.
In just four weeks the campaign created significant awareness around a previously un-discussed issue and turned a disengaged audience into activists with over a thousand young people sending a V sign back to the tobacco industry and hundreds of thousands more engaging with the messages by sharing or commenting on the content.
Judges’ comments
A well engaged campaign and, for healthcare, quite a brave and ambitious one. It’s a notoriously tough audience segment to communicate with and, though the work could very easily have made us cringe, it worked.
