SYDNEY – While many anti-smoking advocates have resorted to scare tactics to get smokers to quit – for instance, graphic images and warnings such as “SMOKING KILLS” in bold letters on cigarette packets – a new campaign for UK charity QUIT by M&C Saatchi takes on a more hopeful tone, with a calculator that lets smokers calculate the number of years they can gain back when they quit.
“It’s a well-known fact that smoking shortens the life of a smoker, literally taking years off. But by quitting you can get many of those years back – if not all of them,” a press release from the agency said.
The integrated campaign capitalizes on the end of Daylight Savings Time on October 26, when the United Kingdom set back its clocks for one hour to revert back to Greenwich Mean Time.
The campaign uses cigarettes to depict hands on a clock with the words ‘Tonight you get one hour back. Quit and you’ll get years back.’ replacing the numbers. The clock face is also meant to be read counter-clockwise to strengthen the ‘time back’ idea.
A call to action drives people to the Quit UK website, where they can type their age, when they started smoking and numbers of cigarettes smoked daily to calculate an estimate of how many years they would get back if they were to quit today.
The campaign went live with an extensive print rollout in Britain’s mainstream newspapers plus out of home, online and social components in the week leading to the end of Daylight Savings. A highlight is a giant digital billboard in the UK’s prime outdoor real estate, ‘Piccadilly One’ in London’s Piccadilly Circus that went live from Saturday evening until the early hours of Sunday.
According to the calculator, the average 25-year-old male smoker in Britain who smokes 12 cigarettes a day and started smoking at 16 would get back five years of life if he quit today.
QUIT CEO Glyn McIntosh said “Think of all the things you could do in five years. There’s no time like the present to quit the deadly habit of smoking. It was a genius idea from the guys at M&C Saatchi Sydney to link quitting with the end of Daylight Savings. It’s an event that effects everyone living in the UK, obviously including every smoker, so it’s enabled us to get enormous awareness and traction.”
“It’s great that people can go to the website, punch in their details and get an estimated figure – the time of their life – they would get back if they were to quit smoking today. It’s such a compelling, tactile way to show people the ultimate benefit of not smoking,” McIntosh said.
M&C Saatchi Sydney Creative Director Ant Melder said: “It was fun to work on a campaign that involved time travel”.
“The clocks going back is always seen as something of a negative, after all it signals the start of winter. But the reality is that everyone gets an hour back; an extra hour to sleep in, to play with your kids, to do whatever you want, It was a brutally simple thought to link that idea to the time smokers would get back to do all those things if they quit their deadly habit,” Melder added.
CAMPAIGN CREDITS
Client: Glyn McIntosh, Chief Executive, QUIT
Agency: M&C Saatchi Sydney
Executive Creative Director: Ben Welsh
CEO: Jaimes Leggett
Creative Director: Ant Melder
Senior Art Director: Brian Jefferson
Senior Copywriter: Ben Stainlay Executive Producer – Print & Art Buying: Trent Henderson
Production Coordinator: Pearla Ordillo
Finished Artist/Typographer: Mick Tonello
Photographer: Jeremy Hudson
Photography Assistant: Tom Antcliff
Retouching: Cream Studios
Digital Design Director: Richard Smith
Senior Digital Designer: Chi Yusuf
Motion Graphics Designer: Cameron Nash
Senior Digital Producer: Ant Harca
Digital Producer: Michelle Vuong
Web Developers: Roger Chapman, Ticiana Andrade, Stuart O’Connell
Media: Clear Channel & Storm Digital
