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Action on Smoking and Health
A National Legal-Action Antismoking Organization Entirely Supported by Tax-Deductible Contributions
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Study: Hard-Hitting Anti-Smoking Ads Prove Most Effective for Youth [08/06-3]
Excerpts from: Statement of Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids; Study Shows
Hard-Hitting Tobacco Prevention Ads Most Effective
US
Newswire Press Releases [08/05/03]
A study published this week in the journal Tobacco Control demonstrates that
anti-smoking advertisements that use personal testimony and/or that portray
tobacco use and its harms in viscerally negative ways have the biggest impact
on youth. The study of 600 youth in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia
found that youth in each country responded similarly to the same anti-smoking
ads. These results suggest that tobacco countermarketing campaigns must be hard-hitting
in order to be most effective and underscore the need to resist efforts by tobacco
companies to water down such ads. These findings also help explain why so-called
youth tobacco prevention campaigns run by tobacco companies, which use neither
of these approaches, have not been proven effective and have even been shown
to undermine otherwise effective campaigns.
The current study involved 37 anti-smoking ads developed by various tobacco control agencies. Each of the 600 youth viewed and rated a subset of the ads and was contacted by telephone a week later to assess recall of the ads, as well as whether they had thought about the ads or discussed them in the week following the viewing. The presence of personal testimonial or viscerally negative characteristics increased the proportion of subjects who rated ads as very good, selected them as ads that stand out, and recalled, thought about, or discussed the ads at follow-up.
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