Minnesota Partnership for Action against Tobacco

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Minnesota Partnership for Action against Tobacco

Two Appletree Square
8011 34th Ave. S, Ste. 400
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55425
USA
Telephone: (952) 767-1400
Fax: (952) 767-1422
Web site: www.mpaat.org

MINNESOTA PARTNERSHIP FOR ACTION AGAINST TOBACCO CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

The Minnesota Partnership for Action against Tobacco (MPAAT) was created in 1998 with funding from that state's individual out-of-court settlement of its suit against tobacco companies. Charged with a mission of encouraging adults to stop smoking, the organization supplemented counseling, support, and education services with a statewide marketing campaign. In its early years of operation, MPAAT used ads developed for similar campaigns in other states, but in 2000 it began an agency search preparatory to launching its own original antismoking advertisements. The result was a multiyear campaign, crafted by Minneapolis agency Clarity Coverdale Fury (CCF), integrating messages about secondhand smoke with the promotion of a toll-free hotline.

The MPAAT campaign, budgeted at an estimated $5 to $6 million a year, took as its starting point the notion that adult smokers were already aware of the health risks of their habit and that an advertising message capable of encouraging smokers to quit had to provide motivation beyond the effects on the individual, no matter how dramatic. The campaign thus focused on smokers' loved ones, both by making direct reference to the relatively underappreciated perils of secondhand smoke and by showing what smokers had to lose were they to die prematurely as a result of smoking. Noteworthy TV spots included one in which secondhand smoke took the form of a ghostly hand strangling an infant; one in which a grandfather bent down to catch his newly toddling infant grandson in his arms, only to have the infant walk through him, revealing that the grandfather was a ghost; and one in which a dying woman held her infant and recorded herself singing "You Are My Sunshine" as a keepsake for the child to have after the mother's imminent smoking-related death.

MPAAT claimed immediate gains in the number of smokers who had stopped smoking in front of children, and thousands of people called the toll-free helpline established to provide support for smokers making the attempt to quit. The spot featuring the dying mother and her infant was one of the only regional commercials named among Adweek's Best Spots of 2002. CCF continued to refine and develop its secondhand smoke and helpline pitches in subsequent years.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Antitobacco advertising first became effective in the late 1960s, when the Federal Communications Commission ruled that TV broadcasters must donate airtime to one antitobacco advertiser for every four commercial slots sold to tobacco companies. Organizations such as the American Cancer Society, whose marketing resources were minimal compared with those of tobacco corporations, were able to push their messages, for the first time, in front of a prime-time television audience. This era of prominent antismoking messages lasted only until 1971, however, when a congressional ban on the TV advertising of tobacco products was passed. The new law meant that donated airtime became dramatically harder to come by, and the 1970s and 1980s saw a corresponding dearth of antitobacco advertising during peak viewing hours.

This situation began to change in 1988, with the passage of a California referendum calling for a tax hike on cigarettes to be used in part to fund an ambitious media campaign aimed at denormalizing tobacco use. The campaign won wide acclaim and helped reduce California's smoking rates. Several other states followed the California model of taxpayer-funded antismoking campaigns in the 1990s, and many more states went on to launch campaigns with money from the historic 1998 settlement of tobacco lawsuits filed by 46 state attorneys general.

Minnesota reached an individual out-of-court settlement with the tobacco companies in 1998 and earmarked $202 million of its $6.6 billion total payout for the endowment of a nonprofit public interest group, the Minnesota Partnership for Action against Tobacco. MPAAT's mission was to encourage current smokers to give up the habit and make it easier for them to do so. The organization used advertising to motivate smokers to quit, and it provided counseling and information to help them see the decision through. In its first years of existence, MPAAT ran advertising originally crafted for campaigns in other states, but in 2000 the organization began planning for an original media campaign. MPAAT underwrote focus groups to arrive at the strategic outlines of the campaign and in early 2001 selected CCF to helm the effort.

TARGET MARKET

The MPAAT campaign targeted all Minnesota residents who were smokers. Focus-group preparation for the campaign had led MPAAT to the conclusion that the campaign needed to communicate more than the health risks of smoking if it were to be effective with this audience. Smokers were aware of the health risks to themselves, the agency believed, but were in need of a message that would motivate them by other means to take on the arduous task of overcoming their physical addiction. Research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control had revealed, however, that smokers had divergent attitudes toward the habit and that no single approach could be trusted to speak to the whole group. CCF thus strove to "do a comprehensive campaign," creative director Jac Coverdale told Adweek, "so that everywhere people look there's lots of different messages." Each of these messages, moreover, had to avoid belittling smokers or seeming to take the moral high ground on the issue of tobacco. Though the antismoking message had to be dramatic enough to motivate people to quit smoking, CCF recognized the difficulty smokers had in quitting and sought to honor that truth in the campaign, while placing a complementary priority on transmitting respect for smokers as people.

FIGHTING TOBACCO ON TWO FRONTS

The Minnesota Partnership for Action against Tobacco (MPAAT) was funded by that state's 1998 settlement with tobacco companies for the specific purpose of persuading current smokers to quit. All of the organization's advertising, therefore, targeted adult smokers. MPAAT was not the only state-sponsored antitobacco advertiser in Minnesota, however. The Minnesota Department of Health launched its own campaign, "Target Market," which was, like the MPAAT work, crafted by Minneapolis agency Clarity Coverdale Fury. "Target Market" was aimed at teenagers and encouraged them to avoid tobacco use in part by pointing out the ways in which tobacco companies manipulatively targeted underage groups.

COMPETITION

The California Department of Health Services (CDHS) continued, during this time, to devote cigarette-tax revenues to one of the nation's most ambitious antismoking efforts, typically budgeted at more than $20 million a year. One of the most well-known CDHS marketing efforts was a 1997 billboard campaign featuring cowboys on horseback overtly reminiscent of the famous Marlboro Man imagery. CDHS put new words in the cowboys' mouths, however. Copy running with one ad read, "I miss my lung, Bob." In 2000 CDHS changed course somewhat by launching a newly aggressive assault on the integrity of tobacco companies themselves. Commercials featuring fictional tobacco executive Ken Lane began appearing in 2001 and garnered notice not just from the advertising industry and consumers but from the tobacco industry as well. The fly-on-the-wall, documentary-like TV spots showed Lane, in discussions with his colleagues, explaining with relish the insidious business practices of tobacco companies. Two real-life tobacco companies filed a lawsuit against CDHS alleging that the Lane commercials infringed on their rights and biased potential jurors in ongoing tobacco litigation. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed, and CDHS remained committed to a large-scale media campaign.

Two other states, Massachusetts and Florida, preceded Minnesota with high-profile media campaigns meant to reduce the influence of tobacco companies and limit teen smoking. The campaigns, both called "Truth," were aimed at pointing out the supposed dishonesty of the tobacco industry. One of the early Massachusetts TV spots featured Patrick Reynolds, a grandson of tobacco-company founder R.J. Reynolds, who informed viewers about the numerous harmful chemicals added to cigarettes. Noteworthy work in the Florida campaign paired images of tobacco executives giving congressional testimony with a sitcom laugh track and showed teenagers phoning tobacco companies to ask pointed questions.

The 1998 master settlement of tobacco litigation between four companies and 46 state attorneys general resulted in the creation of a public interest group called the American Legacy Foundation (ALF), among many other changes. Funded by money from the settlement, ALF supported a nationwide antismoking media campaign of unprecedented scope and budget resources. Crafted by the agencies responsible for the Massachusetts and Florida campaigns, the ALF campaign (also called "Truth") confronted tobacco companies perhaps more vigorously than any advertising that preceded it. An early series of spots focused on the filming of teenagers leaving body bags outside the corporate headquarters of Philip Morris, but the major TV networks pulled the commercials following protests by the tobacco companies.

MARKETING STRATEGY

After the results of four Minnesota focus groups revealed that both smokers and nonsmokers in the state felt that antismoking advertising needed to go beyond warnings about the personal health risks of smoking, MPAAT presented these findings to the eight Minnesota ad agencies it was considering for the account. CCF, more than the others, successfully integrated the focus-group findings with its proposed creative work. It was CCF's belief that, while individuals might not quit smoking because of health risks to themselves, the knowledge that they were harming loved ones to an extent still widely unrecognized could provide them with the necessary motivation to kick the habit. Illustrations of the dangers of secondhand smoke and of the kinds of heartbreak resulting from early death caused by smoking thus formed the basis of the emotional appeals in the campaign. CCF and MPAAT also recognized the need to provide smokers with hope in their battle with the addiction, so a 24-hour helpline was established.

Budgeted at an estimated $5 to $6 million annually, the CCF-crafted MPAAT advertising was launched in early 2001 and continued to run through 2005 with different taglines but without significant alteration in concept, with TV, radio, outdoor, and print elements, all of which conformed to the same overall strategy. Early on CCF negotiated with TV broadcasters, radio stations, newspapers, and owners of outdoor advertising spaces, securing additional placement time for no additional charge by asking these outlets to consider the ads part of their commitment to public service initiatives. CCF thereby gained access, in the campaign's first year, to 34 percent more TV time than it paid for, as well as 76 percent more time to run outdoor ads.

Many individual executions were intended to jolt smokers unpleasantly, while others used humor to illustrate the dangers of secondhand smoke or to promote the helpline. In all of the campaign advertising, CCF took pains to avoid any hint of insult or condescension. An early TV spot portrayed secondhand smoke as a phantom hand reaching out to choke a baby, and a poster showed a pet bird killed in its cage by secondhand smoke. Another TV spot from the campaign's first year showed a grandfather crouching delightedly to hug his toddling grandson, who had just learned to walk, but the child walked through the grandfather, revealing that the grandfather was a ghost. A similarly direct radio spot featured a helpline caller whose unpleasantly coarse, croaking voice was the result of having her larynx and vocal cords removed because of throat cancer.

"Sunshine," perhaps the MPAAT effort's most arresting TV spot, appeared as the centerpiece of the 2002 installment of the campaign. The commercial showed a young woman, bald and wearing a knitted cap, setting up a home-movie camera while holding her infant daughter. Speaking to the camera, the mother said, "Hi, Emma. It's Mommy, and this is you. Emma, Mommy's really sick." Going on to explain that she wanted to give her daughter something to remember her by, the mother, all the while trying to suppress her palpable torment at the situation, sang "You Are My Sunshine" to the obliviously curious infant. At the end of the plaintive song, text appeared onscreen reading, "Be there tomorrow. Stop smoking today." The toll-free helpline number then appeared.

Other spots conveyed their antismoking message with more humor. One spot showed a man in the passenger seat of a car silently lighting a cigarette. The woman driving responded by jerking the car's wheel so that the car sped through a meadow and narrowly missed an enormous tree as the smoking passenger screamed for his life. When the driver casually returned the car to the road, she informed the man, "You're endangering my life. I'm just returning the favor." Another showed a man at a dinner party being pulled out of his seat, pinned against the wall, and dragged outside of the house by an unseen force. The man then lit a cigarette and a voice-over explained, "It's tough to fight the urge to smoke. With help, you're seven times more likely to quit." The helpline number then appeared onscreen.

OUTCOME

Three months after the campaign's launch, MPAAT sponsored a survey whose findings indicated that more than 70 percent of Minnesota's smokers had curtailed their smoking around children because of MPAAT's advertising. Another survey indicated that 60 to 70 percent of those surveyed recalled the advertising, and a large number of respondents had extremely specific memories of the advertising. During the campaign's first year more than 5,000 people called the MPAAT helpline to ask for help in quitting smoking. In 2002, after the TV spot featuring the grandfather who turned out to be a ghost was picked up for airing in California, a reference to the commercial as "chilling" appeared on the popular prime-time sitcom Friends, testifying to the spot's power and talk value, and the commercial "Sunshine" was chosen as one of Adweek's Best Spots of 2002. As of 2003 more than 10,000 Minnesota smokers had called the MPAAT helpline, and more than 7,800 had sought counseling. The campaign continued to evolve in 2004 and 2005.