Teen-Driven Ad Campaign Puts Heat on Big Tobacco

In the beginning, smoking is about image. Three thousand American teens will light up for the first time today and, for most, says 17-year-old Alexandria Drouin, “it’s like, ‘I want to look cool.’ ”

But what would happen if young smokers saw themselves not as cool, but as targets? As pawns, cynically manipulated in a corporate chess game? What if the brand they chose was not Marlboro or Camel but Truth?

Those are the questions that may be answered over the next two years in Florida as the state begins to spend $50 million of Big Tobacco’s money to pay for a teen-directed, guerrilla-style advertising campaign designed to reverse the rising rate at which young people are taking up cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco.

The ad campaign, financed from the $11.3-billion windfall that Florida reaped from cigarette makers last year in settlement of a lawsuit, was launched two weeks ago with a blitz of television and radio spots and full-page newspaper ads, one of which attacked the movie industry for making smoking glamorous in films.

“We’re your best customers. So why are you trying to kill us?” asked the ad, which ran April 13 in The Times and Variety. “Why does the film industry continue to glamorize an addictive habit that often ends in a slow, agonizing death?”

Another ad, which ran in the Washington Post, the New York Times and USA Today, shows a girl in a black ski mask reading from a ransom note. “We may be hostages. But today, we’re the ones making the demands,” it reads. “We’re truth. A generation that’s tired of being lied to about tobacco. Tired of replacing the 1,000 customers tobacco kills every day. Tired of being a target.”

The ads that make up the opening volley in Florida’s war on teen tobacco use--the first in the nation to be financed by a settlement with the tobacco industry--came out of a weekend Teen Tobacco Summit in Haines City, where 600 high school students brainstormed ideas with a creative team from Crispin Porter & Bogusky, a Miami ad agency.

Attacks Center on Supporting Industries

The settlement with tobacco prohibits attacking the industry directly in an ad campaign. Thus, the theme which emerged from the summit focuses instead on those who support the industry: distributors, advertising agencies, media that accept tobacco ads and films.

The brand-conscious teens created their own brand, Truth, and came up with the tag line for the campaign: “Their brand is lies. Our brand is truth.”

The ad campaign has a logo--the word “Truth” in an oval. It has an Internet page on the World Wide Web: https://www.wholetruth.com And it has both the youthful energy and enough cash to fuel an ambitious plan to use irreverent tactics--pirate radio station programming, an underground ‘zine and Michael Moore-style video confrontations with tobacco distributors, for example--to tar smoking’s cool, rebellious image.

“The whole truth idea came after we saw internal memos from tobacco companies which totally contradict their public statements about not targeting teens,” said Jared Perez, 17, a high school junior from Belleair, Fla., near Tampa. “Smoking is not rebellious or individualistic. Smokers are manipulated into doing exactly what tobacco companies want.” Expectations are high for the Florida campaign. Along with $50 million of tobacco’s money for the ad campaign alone, the settlement earmarks another $150 million for education, minority health programs and enforcement of laws governing the retailing of tobacco products to minors.

Big Tobacco “is in for a big surprise,” Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles told the teens in Haines City last month. “We showed they could lose,” he said, referring to the settlement of the lawsuit filed to recoup the costs of smoking-related illness. “We broke Joe Camel’s back.”

Enthusiasm also runs high. Drouin, a junior at Sunset Senior High in Miami-Dade County, said she left the Teen Summit convinced that “I am going to make a difference.”

“Nobody likes to be told what to do. But this has a chance because it’s teens talking--not lecturing but informing. We’re going to let people know they are being targeted, so you better watch out. Because if we don’t rebel against what they want us to do, our generation will be wiped out.”

Peter Mitchell, marketing director of the Florida Pilot Program on Tobacco Control, set up to manage the advertising account for the state’s Department of Health, said: “The fact that we have teen involvement--and plenty of money--is huge. Nobody’s ever tried this before.”

But also huge, Mitchell acknowledges, is convincing a teenager--flush with notions of invincibility and wooed by images of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet puffing away in “Titanic”--that using tobacco is harmful.

35% of Students Surveyed Use Tobacco

Indeed, the latest statistics indicate just how huge the task is. In results released by the state last week, a survey of 23,000 Florida high school students shows that 35% use some form of tobacco. Among middle-schoolers 12 to 14, 24% say that they have used some form of tobacco in the last 30 days. Both figures are higher than the 22% of Florida adults who say they are regular smokers.

Nationally, the trend is also up. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month revealed that tobacco use by teens had soared by one-third over the last six years, from 27.5% to 36.4%

Those involved in the Florida campaign said that they recognize what they are up against in taking on Big Tobacco, a sophisticated marketer which, according to the Federal Trade Commission, spends about $14 million a day in the United States to endow cigarette smoking with an insouciant, existential appeal. “It’s going to be really hard,” said Perez. “I see people light up as they leave school and it’s easy to get cynical about our chances of getting people to stop.”

Even as participants of the Teen Summit were kicking around anti-smoking ideas, in fact, an anonymous Internet site celebrated teen smoking with a Web page that offered kids tips on how to pick a brand, how to smoke at school without getting caught and how to tell their parents that they smoke. The summiteers later bombarded the Web site with so much e-mail that the creators shut it down.

But even with that victory, many wondered aloud if talking teens out of smoking can ever succeed. “I’ve seen tons of commercials on TV against smoking,” said Alicia Welch, a high school senior from Hollywood, Fla. “Teens know it’s bad for them but they do it anyway. They do it to rebel.”

Ah, rebellion! That, say those in charge of the ad campaign, is the key. “The aim here is to make rebelling against manipulation as cool as smoking,” Mitchell said. “The kids are saying: ‘It’s no fun to rebel against your parents and smoke if you’re doing what rich white adults want you to do.’

“This is the test, with this generation of kids in Florida,” said Mitchell, “to see if they buy into this movement to show cigarettes as a symbol of addiction, not rebellion. Past generations haven’t. But never before have we had a campaign like this, so teen-oriented, so edgy.”

An Ad Agency With Youth on Its Side

To help create and then ramrod a cutting-edge ad campaign, the state chose a 50-person Miami firm that interviewed dozens of young smokers to come up with a proposal that emphasized teen “rage” over manipulation by the tobacco industry. Crispin Porter & Bogusky, which had billings of about $60 million last year from clients that included Checker’s fast-food chain and AvMed Health Plans, is also a firm with youth on its side. President Jeff Hicks is just 32. Creative director Alex Bogusky is 34.

“What kids told us was that they wanted the opportunity to make up their own minds,” said Hicks. “They said, ‘We’re only getting half the story now, from adults who want to profit off of us. And we’re pissed about that.’

“They wanted information; they wanted the truth.”

The first television spots were filmed right at the Teen Summit, using the delegates as talent. With the grainy feel of a home video, one spot shows the girl in a black ski maskreading from the list of demands. In another, a teen looks into the camera to address “supporters of tobacco.” “We know you’ve been targeting us,” she says, “getting us to replace the 1,000 smokers that quit every day--you know, ‘cause they died.”

Last week the agency flew Perez and another teenager to New York, where they filmed a second set of television commercials, which began running in Florida this week. The teens are seen trying to contact tobacco distributors, magazine publishers and ad agency chiefs by telephone.

With the calls on speaker phones, and the cameras rolling, “We put them on the spot,” said Perez. “If they believe in what they’re doing, they should be able to defend themselves.”

Perez said that the agency tried--and failed--to reach Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

Another series of television spots is aimed at the parents, pointing up the dangers of secondhand smoke. Those ads are running only in Florida.

Crispin Porter media director Rich Rivera said that a new cross-over television spot, designed to appeal to both teens and their parents, will be broadcast in several Florida markets May 14 before and during the ballyhooed final “Seinfeld” episode on NBC.

Also in the works are more “guerrilla tactics,” said Rivera, similar to the air strike the agency pulled off last month when it paid $700 to fly a banner over thousands of race fans at the Marlboro Grand Prix in nearby Homestead. The banner read: “By the end of this race, 3,000 kids will have started smoking.”

As the campaign unfolds, Hicks, Bogusky and others from the ad agency talk regularly in conference calls to Perez, Drouin and a dozen or so other teens who serve as an advisory panel. The panelists represent various ethnic backgrounds and regions of the state and have the final word over what goes out over the Truth logo. “They are like any other client; they know their business better than we do,” said Hicks. “The minute they say, ‘That’s lame,’ it’s pulled.”

In trying to halt the upward trend on teenage tobacco use, Hicks said, “we’re up against an incredible hurdle. Turning this around is not going to happen overnight.”

But there are incentives beyond the health of a generation. According to its contract with the state, Crispin Porter can increase its annual compensation of $1.9 million by at least 10% if quarterly surveys find that teen tobacco use significantly declines.

Double-Edged Sword of Counter-Ads

Using counter-advertising is risky. A recent study conducted for the Advocacy Institute, a Washington-based public interest group, showed that informative counter-ads can be a deterrent when they point out the health risks posed by tobacco.

However, counter-ads can also backfire, as they apparently did in Arizona when tax monies raised by Proposition 200 paid for an anti-tobacco education campaign. “News reports suggest the campaign may have backfired by making smoking more appealing to youth by promoting it as something that is not for kids,” says the study. Alexandria Drouin says she thinks the Florida campaign has a chance “because we’re teens, and we’re using tactics we would listen to: the truth.”

Drouin’s father is a heavy smoker, she said, and she knows the torment he has gone through over the years trying to quit. Still, she said, “I didn’t get it until I went to the summit and realized how we are being targeted by tobacco companies to be lifelong customers.

“I think kids might recognize that, if we get that message out. You know, kids think they are immune to addiction, whatever. But that’s not truth.”

Researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.

* TRIAL WINDS DOWN: Tobacco firms say they never marketed to children. D10