Anti-smoking cartoon

You know the ads from Truth, the youth smoking prevention effort funded by a big 1998 master lawsuit settlement between the tobacco majors and 46 states? Since 2000 they’ve been educating young people about the dangers of smoking by publicizing tobacco industry marketing memos and analyzing the actual contents of cigarettes for elements such as ammonia and arsenic. Necessary work—but also necessarily grim.

So for its 2008 campaign, Truth has opted to lighten up and speak its piece through musical numbers and cartoon characters. Needless to say, the “Sunny Side of Truth” goes heavy on the irony, with TV spots feature use dancing leprechauns and speculate that 5 million tobacco-related deaths around the world in 2007 may just be a typo.

The campaign also relies heavily on online components to drive viral spread: so much so, in fact, that for the first time Truth isn’t including any print in its media buy, just TV (primarily cable channels such as MTV, VH-1, Fuse and ABC Family) and the Internet.

“We needed a campaign that would have staying power,” says Nicole Dorrler, senior marketing director for youth prevention with the American legacy Foundation, which runs the Truth brand. “We’re going to be running this campaign until October 2008, longer than our previous campaigns, and we needed the ability to create lots of extensions. So we needed more than a television spot or series of spots; we needed an idea that worked in all channels.”

Except print, that is. Truth targets the 12-to-17 age group that is most prone to taking up smoking for the first time. That demo is also a very light consumer of print content, at least in any form that’s likely to carry ads. “We’re all aware that print is falling off in importance among this age group, while interactive is taking on a more prevalent media position for them,” Dorrler says. “It just made more sense to be in a channel that not only was where teens gravitate but where they can have peer-to-peer interaction and spread the message virally—since that’s the best way for our target group to receive the message.”

Truth will make use of a few other channels as the campaign progresses, however. The organization will run spots before the appropriate features in movie theaters in April and then again in September via the 10,000 theater Screenvision movie-ad network. Truth has run cinema spots before, in October 2006 and then again in January of last year. “We plan to reach 3 to 4 million 12-to-17-year-olds with our message in April through cinema,” says Dorrler. “We’ve found it’s a great place because the audience is very engaged with a message before the movie. At that age, when they’re watching TV or viewing online, they’re likely to be multi-tasking with computers and music and thus somewhat distracted.”

There’s plenty to keep young targets engaged on the brand’s Web site, www.TheTruth.com, including visitor polls and an interactive tour of the chemicals in cigarettes. Given the campaign’s tongue-in-cheek optimism, the latter stresses how useful these substances can be—in everything from pesticides and hair removers to rocket fuel and urine. Visitors can also download buddy icons from the TV spots, wallpapers, entire PC desktop sets and printable posters.

One feature, the “Log Blog”, lets visitors write messages and send them to friends… in feces as produced by happy cartoon beavers. Tasteless and infantile, yes, but according to Dorrler all the more appealing to the target demo. And as the site says, while ammonia is found in both poop and cigarettes, “Poop is found in bunnies, unicorns and your grandma, so how bad can it be?”

But the engagement standout on the site has to be “Key-Tar Slayer”, a game that uses the music and anti-tobacco lyrics from the TV spots as the basis for a keyboard game. The game is easy to learn quickly but involving enough that visitors will make multiple visits and prolonged stays, particularly since they can register and get their high scores posted on a leader board for all to see. It’s the first time Truth has asked visitors to register on the Web site for any reason.

The Web site will showcase the five TV spots in the campaign as they air during the year but will also offer online-only video content to build frequency. “We’ll offer online exclusives that give this age group the behind-the-scenes look that they’re used to getting from the extra features on a movie DVD,” Dorrler says.

All these components are engineered either to be placed on personal Web pages or spread virally through e-mail. “Proliferation is the main strategy of our online campaign,” says Dorrler. “All of our assets will either be embeddable or mailable, which allows us to extend the message in a very inexpensive way.” The campaign also has profile pages on the MySpace, Bebo, Xanga and Hi-5 social networks, with a separate application, a virtual game of Truth or Dare, running on Facebook.

Digital marketing is no longer the red-headed stepchild of TV promotion, Dorrler says. Mobile, out-of-home advertising, online banners and rich media ads, social media, widgets: “Online has so many facets that when you’re thinking of a campaign you now have to think holistically,” she says. “Our strategy, whether online or elsewhere, is to extend our reach through increased personal involvement, pass-along proliferation and ultimately loyalty to the Truth brand.”

Future extensions for the latest Truth campaign may include getting some of the animated characters incorporated into programming on Nickelodeon and MTV. As it did last year, Truth also plans to mount a summer tour of music festivals such as the Vans Warped Tour.