Quitline Launches New Ads in Successful Crayons Campaign

Quitline Launches New Ads in Successful Crayons Campaign

The Crayons campaign, which went to air in August 2014, has been one of Quitline’s most successful ever, leading to a 29.1% increase in demand for the Quitline service. The quit smoking service has now launched a new series of television advertisements to extend the campaign.

“We are so pleased at how successful the advertisements have been. We know that we need hard hitting campaigns like this one if we are to reduce smoking rates and achieve the Government’s goal of Smokefree Aotearoa 2025,” says Quitline Chief Executive Paula Snowden.

She continues: “Using children in the advertisements to illicit an emotional response was a new approach for us. We involved a child psychologist in the testing of the campaign and have been careful to play the advertisements during adult programming only as we do not want children to view them.”

The campaign targets people in high smoking prevalence areas and was developed following extensive research with these populations. This research, which tested motivators to quit smoking, showed that those in the target population were more concerned about their children taking up smoking than other factors like the long term effects on their health or the cost of cigarettes.

Building on this theme of role-modelling, the advertisements focus on children who come from a loving, happy home in which the adults around them smoke. As a result, the children believe smoking is normal. We see them mimicking the adults smoking and eventually attempting to smoke themselves. While the tone of the advertisements is light, the message is hard hitting and was shown to trigger feelings of guilt among viewers, which in turn translated to an increased desire to quit smoking.

Given the high smoking prevalence rates among Māori and Pacific smokers, these priority populations were a key target audience for the campaign. It is particularly significant that registrations from Māori clients were up 35% in September and sign ups from Pacific people up 26.8% in October 2014. The next advertisements in the series aim to bring in a stronger Pacific presence as well as to showcase some of the benefits of quitting.

Phase One of the Crayons campaign was produced by Māori Television. Phase Two was produced by Screentime Productions. The Executive Producer of both phases was Toni Urlich and the Producer of both was Valentine Taylor.

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