The Overview

The brief for this campaign came out of research that revealed a significant lack of awareness of the large diversity of cancers caused by smoking. This lack of knowledge provided an opportunity to lend ‘new’ weight to the threat of smoking-related cancer. Surprisingly, the new research revealed that less than a quarter of those asked (24%) could name more than two cancers caused by smoking. And when prompted, less than half of respondents were aware that smoking caused cancer in areas of the body other than the lung, mouth, nasal cavity and throat.

The Insight

The challenge for the agency was to maximise the emotional and rational threat of the 16 cancers message. Cancer itself was not new news. Creative exploration revealed that this was a unique opportunity to create a powerful mix of different emotional threat appeals within the one communication. The campaign would run across traditional and digital media channels, to ensure maximum reach to a broad WA audience.

The Result

The 16 cancers campaign was so successful in achieving ad recall and importance of messaging, that it has since run in multiple locations globally, including New York and the UK.