The U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced that the agency will be launching a $115 million media campaign to decrease tobacco use rates especially among teenagers.
According to Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, the media campaign will be made to target at least 10 million teenagers who are thinking of trying smoking or are already trying tobacco products. The identification of this particular audience segment stemmed from the fact that the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products, headed by Mitch Zeller, found out that teenagers who experiment with tobacco regards this practice as a way of coping with the stress that they feel about violence, poverty, or family.
According to the USA Today, the media campaign will initially target a broader group of audience but follow up ads will also be launched to target specific groups such as Native Americans and gay teens. Zeller also said that the ads were designed after studies which claimed that teens today are more concerned with how smoking affect their physical appearance and the risk of cancer that it impose on them.
One of the ads included in the campaign titled, "The Real Cost", shows a girl trying to buy cigarette from a convenience store. The cashier tells her that she doesn't have enough money for the cigarettes, so the girl peeled off her youthful cheek skin, revealing wrinkled skin underneath, and used it to pay for the cigarettes.
The ads will run on Teen Vogue, YouTube, MTV, and in other media platforms.
The ad campaign seems to be a timely project after a report by new surgeon general reflected that if the current smoking rates won't be decreased, 5.6 million American teenagers and children will die due to tobacco-related diseases. Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released again their 2012 campaign, "Tips for Former Smokers". This campaign which cost around $48 million to 60 million every year has helped at least 100,000 Americans to stop the habit of smoking.
