Everybody Knows Anti Smoking Campaign

Media Campaigns: Final Assignment 

“Everybody knows” is an anti-tobacco campaign developed by the New South Wales (NSW) Cancer Institute in 2009 (NSW Cancer Institute, 2011). Throughout the entire duration of  the campaign graphic images of diseases caused by smoking are presented. The public service announcement (PSA) continues with the line “everybody knows smoking kills… but you still smoke”. Later, it mentions “Maybe you do need help breaking the habit” and offers the smokers a number to reach for help. During the entire PSA, the song “Everybody knows” from Leonard Cohen (NSW Cancer Institute, 2011).  Although this paper, focuses on the one-minute PSA on television released by the NSW Cancer Institute, the campaign was also presented as a 30-second PSA on the radio.

Before developing the campaign, the NSW Cancer Institute conducted a qualitative research aiming to understand smokers and their ideology around smoking. The research concluded that smokers are able to remember images portrayed in cigarette packages, believe that getting a fatal disease is unavoidable and often acknowledge smoking as the cause of health problems but construct excuses to delay the quitting even when wanting to quit (NSW Cancer Institute, 2011). Based on these results, the NSW Cancer Institute aimed their campaigns to personalising the fearful smoking consequences, decrease the knowledge gap between the act of smoking and the near threat of causing fatal diseases. By doing so,  they wanted smokers to feel vulnerable and encourage them to quit immediately. By looking at past campaigns developed by this institute, most campaigns highlight the negative effects of smoking with graphic, explicit and disturbing imagery of the diseases caused by smoking (NSW Cancer Institute, 2011).  Since 2005 the NSW Institute has developed one campaign per disease, including gangrene, heart disease, carotid blockage, mouth and lung cancer. The “Everybody knows” campaign states combines all graphic images from past campaigns to answer  the “why to quit” but also shows smokers the “how to quit” when presenting the quitline as a tool at the end. As it can be observed in Fig 1 below, the “Everybody knows smoking kills” campaign becomes a collage unifying all the storylines.

 [pic 1]

According to the report released by the NSW Cancer Institute, familiar scenery was utilized with the purpose of reminding audiences the excuses that they have been saying to themselves to delay the quitting when they witnessed past PSAs (NSW Cancer Institute, 2011). A relationship was then drawn between the organization’s campaigns and the graphic prints on cigarette packaging to create a powerful message: contracting a fatal disease becomes unavoidable when smoking. In addition to the research done previously, the NSW Cancer Institute organised focus groups to test the reactions on spectators before releasing the campaign. All participants reported that at least one graphic image from a previous campaign was recognised, while admitting to the belief that getting one of the diseases cannot be avoided in the future. The focus groups contained samples of their primary target: adults with low socioeconomic status aging between 25 and 44 years (NSW Cancer Institute, 2011).