Media Campaigns are an Essential Part of any Comprehensive Tobacco Control Program
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Best Practices for Comprehensive Tobacco Control Programs provides science-based guidance for tobacco prevention programs. Public education (counter-marketing) campaigns are a key element of these programs, along with community-based efforts and help for smokers who want to quit. According the Best Practices, public education media campaigns prevent initiation of tobacco use, promote and encourage tobacco cessation, counter pro-tobacco messages and inform smokers where to get help with quitting. We should listen to the experts at CDC to design tobacco prevention programs that work.i

Media Campaigns Work
A comprehensive report released in June 2008 by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), The Role of the Media in Promoting and Reducing Tobacco Use, concluded that anti-tobacco media campaigns are effective in reducing smoking among youth and adults. Particularly, advertisements that evoke strong emotions have the most impact on viewers, and youth even react positively to anti-tobacco advertisements aimed at adults.ii

The Task Force on Community Preventive Services, an independent expert advisory committee created by CDC, found “strong evidence” that mass media campaigns, combined with other interventions, are effective in reducing tobacco use initiation, in reducing consumption of tobacco products, and in increasing cessation among tobacco users.iii

The 2000 Surgeon General’s report, Reducing Tobacco Use, suggests that counter-marketing efforts that include pro-health messages and messages about the tobacco industry’s marketing and promotional tactics are required to counter the tobacco industry’s efforts to promote misleading messages and images about tobacco to young people and adults. It also found that mass media campaigns are effective at informing the public, including youth, about the hazards of smoking and at promoting specific cessation actions and services.iv

According the 2010 Independent Evaluation for the New York Tobacco Control Program, in early 2009, public awareness of NY TCP television advertisements reached a high of 70 percent, but as a result of various budget cuts and contract approval delays, awareness declined to only 14 percent by the end of the year. These cuts have a significant impact on intentions to quit, quit attempts, and calls to the Quitline. Ultimately, it means that there will be fewer quit attempts and fewer smokers quitting. v

Perhaps the most telling evidence that tobacco prevention media campaigns work is that the tobacco companies were willing to take their own advertising off of television in order to keep these kinds of campaigns off the air. When anti-tobacco ads were required to be aired by the Fairness Doctrine in the late 1960’s, they were so effective that the tobacco companies did not object when Congress enacted legislation to take tobacco ads off the air in order to stop the tobacco prevention ads –despite the fact that there was only one anti-tobacco ad for every three tobacco company advertisements. Indeed, smoking rates dropped in the late 1960’s as the result of the counter ads and rose after both the cigarette ads and the counter ads disappeared from the TV screen.vi

Media Campaigns are Crucial to Combating Billions of Dollars that the Tobacco Industry Spends on Marketing Each Year
According to the most recent FTC data (from 2006), tobacco companies spend 12.8 billion dollars per year marketing their deadly products, much of it aimed at kids. This means the tobacco companies spend $25 dollars trying to get people to smoke for every ONE dollar the states spend preventing tobacco use. Tobacco prevention media campaigns are an essential part of countering this aggressive marketing by the tobacco companies.vii

The Power of Advertising  
At least $150 billion is spent on advertising in America each year to influence individual behavior because it works. This includes spending by businesses of all kinds as well as by politicians in their own campaigns.vii

SOURCES i Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Best Practices for Comprehensive Tobacco Control Programs, Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), October 2007, http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/tobacco_control_programs/stateandcommunity/best_practices.

ii National Cancer Institute, The Role of the Media in Promoting and Reducing Tobacco Use, Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph No. 19, NIH Pub. No. 07-6242, June 2008, http://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/tcrb/monographs/19/m19_complete.pdf

iii The Guide to Community-Preventive Services, “The Effectiveness of Mass Media Campaigns to Reduce Initiation of Tobacco Use and to Increase Cessation,” January 3, 2003, http://www.thecommunityguide.org/tobacco/tobac-int-mass-media.pdf.

iv U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Reducing Tobacco Use: A Report of the Surgeon General. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Office on Smoking and Health, 2000.

http://www.health.state.ny.us/prevention/tobacco_control/docs/2010-08_independent_evaluation_report.pdf.

v RTI International, 2010 Independent Evaluation for the New York Tobacco Control Program, Research Triangle Park, NC, August 2010.

vi National Cancer Institute, The Role of the Media in Promoting and Reducing Tobacco Use, Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph No. 19, NIH Pub. No. 07-6242, June 2008, http://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/tcrb/monographs/19/m19_complete.pdf

vii Federal Trade Commission. Cigarette Report for 2006. Issued August 2009.

viii Business Wire. (2008). “TNS Media Intelligence Reports U.S. Advertising Expenditures Grew 0.2 Percent in 2007.” Retrieved from http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080325005529&newsLang=en.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that Nebraska spend $2 per Nebraskan on health communications designed to promote tobacco-free Nebraskans. These media efforts should be designed to help keep kids from starting to smoke or use other tobacco products, to help Nebraskans quit smoking and quit other tobacco use and to promote an environment that supports tobacco free kids and adults.