American Cancer Society | Anti-Vaping

<< Work

Getting Teens To Hear You

Brand : American Cancer Society
Project : Anti-Teen Vaping Campaign
My Role : Strategist and Creative Director

Data Used:

  • Conducted Teen and Parent focus groups

  • Data from CDC

  • Date from ACS

  • Various associated scientific sources

Gist : Vaping was rapidly ramping up among teens and believed to be a gateway to smoking—which would wire teens for addiction for life.

Conducted teen/parent research to see what each really knew about vaping. Teens were operating on “friend facts”, parents on each other.

INSIGHT : Teens were never going to listen to a big, old, established org. They were, though, listening to the TRUTH campaign. But parents would listen to us for the very reason their teens wouldn’t. So, we leaned in to who we are.

  • Opportunity was with the parents. They knew surprisingly little and even that was inaccurate.

  • Talk to parents in their language and aligned messaging with the “TRUTH” campaign (6X the budget) so what was being said to teens, we explained to parents.

  • Leveraged experts in tobacco control, our chief medical officer, policy advocates in DC, and a global tobacco scientist to create multiple fact snippet videos based on the available science and research.

  • Helped parents easily understand the facts — more importantly, explain it to their teens.

Results:

  • 2 :30 spots of a teen talking directly to parents. $16K on YouTube = +4M impressions, 43% view completion (benchmark is 28%).

  • $20K on FB/IG = 5.8M impressions. Parents wanted more info. Bingo. Landing page so parents could see info from science, advocacy, health and legal, + latest news and findings about vaping. 53% watched the videos.

  • TV and radio stations asked for the content as PSAs.

While we’ll never know how many parent/teen conversations were prompted by the campaign, it was worth it if we saved even a few teens from being addiction wired for life.