The government of Ontario decided they could save tons of lives and health care money if they could get social smokers to quit before they got addicted.

Makes sense as over 60% of social smokers eventually become smokers.

Strangely, no anti-smoking campaign had ever tackled this key intervention moment. There was just one problem.

How do you convince someone to stop doing something they won’t admit they’re even doing?

After all, they weren’t smoking. They were “social” smoking.

Our campaign took away their social safe place by using humorous analogies to show how ridiculous using the word “social” to justify smoking really was.

This campaign was social by nature – all communications drove to our Facebook page at quitthedenial.com. Paid media that drove to Facebook included cinema ads, online advertising, on campus posters and ads in restaurants and bars.

Given our youthful target, leveraging social media was a natural choice for this campaign. Since peer groups wield such influence with this audience, we needed a forum where they could interact with one another, voice their opinions, and start a conversation no one was having.

In addition to our social platform, we planned to intersect “social smokers” where and when they were most likely to light up. “Social smokers” typically choose to smoke on weekends when they’re out with their friends. By having a presence at weekend haunts like movies and bars we hoped to intersect “Social smokers” in the moment and have them reconsider their actions.

Within 2 weeks of launching the campaign we earned 117 million impressions,

2 million YouTube views and over 141,000 engagements. More importantly,

we got people talking, increasing the conversation around social smoking

by more than 8,600%.

The campaign’s fresh new approach brought it to the attention of the

Canadian and International press. The work was recognized in Ad Week, Ad Age’s

Best Creative of the Day, Ads of the World, Mashable, Time Magazine, and The Huffington

Post.

CNN even ran a story calling it “Maybe the best PSA ever.”

Other interested parties, like Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental

Health, joined the discussion around social smoking, volunteering their time and expertise as contributors to our social discussion. In short, the campaign built an incredible amount of momentum in a very short period of time.