Case study: Make Them Pay

Research commissioned by Cancer Research UK highlighted that young people are apathetic towards the tobacco industry, aren’t aware of the huge health and economic burden that it places on society and, when discussing ‘smoking issues’, smokers tend to blame themselves or the government, but rarely the tobacco industry.

However, tobacco use in England alone costs society approximately £13.8bn each year. Use of tobacco also remains the UK’s single greatest cause of preventable illness and avoidable death, with 100,000 people dying each year from smoking- related diseases, including cancer. The tobacco industry invests a great deal of money in marketing its products to young people and it works hard to stay out of the media. As a result, it is often seen as blameless in relation to these issues.

The video received more than 2.2 million views and had over 2.3 million engagements on social media which surpassed campaign benchmarks. There were 18,591 unique campaign visits to the petition landing page, which drove nearly 5,000 to sign up to the petition. The average time on the landing page was 2:01 minutes, higher than the average time of 1:36 minutes, which demonstrates that those who clicked through from the video were highly engaged.

Kathryn Weir, senior health marketing manager at Cancer Research UK, commented: “The spoken-word concept worked well to communicate some complicated messages in a poetic and engaging way, inspiring many young people to stand up for themselves and their future by sharing the video content and/or signing our petition. By taking a stand against the corporate power of the tobacco industry and pledging support to make them pay for the damage they cause, young people who were engaged by this campaign have directly contributed to efforts to reduce the economic impact of this industry on our society.”