Smoking teenagers grow up to be habitual smokers.

- 88% of the adult smokers start smoking before they turn 18 (2012, US Surgeon General Report)

Quitting smoking is very hard while preventing it isn’t. The government and educational institutions have made regulations and hosted various public campaigns in order to lower the smoking rate among the teenagers. Targeting teenage group, however, needs a more sharpened approach. Friends are one of the strongest influences during their teenage years. To eradicate adolescent smoking, it would be best if the teenagers themselves open up to each other and deliver the anti-smoking message.

Our online platform acts as a buffer of rather heavy subjects. We have also adopted the “craze of decorating” -decorating one’s own diary, phone case, and desk with stickers and illustrations- among K-teens which makes the process of decorating the Nodam (anti-smoking) website much more fun and entertaining.

Using digital technology, the users can share perfectly personal and private messages in public spaces. When A designs a page and tags B, B gets to access to the campaign page through the received link. B opens up the page and sees the main page decorated by A. No one else than B can see the page A designed.

As such, the complex experience of sharing private version of the page using public domain has drew attention of the teenagers, thus allowing the “Nodam” tagging campaign settle as one of the symbolic culture.

Governmental organizations and agencies have regulated access to youth tobacco purchases, and are currently managing various educational programs to inform students of side effects of smoking. The teenagers, however, would not listen to their parents and teachers and even show strong resistance toward them. For those who are already familiar with the possible dangers, the current method is considered “nagging of the older generation”.

We have seen the necessity of a new approach to uproot teenage smoking. When targeting the youth, smoking prevention campaigns should be in the form which teenagers can sympathize with and voluntarily participate in. The core strategy is to use a ‘friend’, who can exercise considerable influence to a teenager. We encouraged students to share the anti-smoking message to each other with the hashtag “Nodam” in their daily basis, and let this campaign blend into K-teen culture.

1) Launching campaign (May – July, 2021) : With the slogan of “I wish you were a non-smoker”, the campaign has first started from the TV commercial. This TVC has widely been shared and played online. The teenagers have shared this commercial by tagging their friends and recommending to participate in “No-dam” campaign.

2) No-dam TAG and TVC in-one Campaign (September – November, 2021) : An online platform has been launched to spread the campaign through social media, while continuing on the TVC-based campaign. By adopting the one-by-one matching technique, users were allowed to privately share their customized webpage. The campaign has spread from teenagers to online influencers and celebrities.

3) Nodam Concert – Sharing Nodam campaign with K-Pop artists (November, 2021) : A Nodam concert has been scheduled to invite K-Pop idol group such as WJSN and Oh My Girl to promote the campaign.

Business impact – sales, donations, site traffic / Response rate / Impressions / Change in behavior / Consumer awareness)

Within 2 months of campaign, up to 36 thousand (35,949) users put up hashtag “Nodam” and 70 thousand shared the webpage. We have recorded total visitors of 2 million, and total(first) view of 1,572,230. The website contains posts regarding anti-smoking. The number of visitors through the hashtag “Nodam” has increased by 1600%. (155 thousand (2020) -> 264 thousand (2021)