Smoking is still the single largest preventable cause of death in the United States. For every person who dies from tobacco use, another 30 Americans continue to suffer with at least one serious tobacco-related illness. Despite these facts, one in five U.S. adults still use some form of tobacco regularly.[2]

Being told to quit smoking is the last thing many smokers want to see or hear. Most think they know the dangers of cigarette smoking and have been told that smoking kills so many times, that the message had started to lose its power. Even worse, they often dismissed the consequence of death by saying, “at least I’ll die happy.”

So, instead of focusing on death we chose to focus on living with a tobacco-related disease. Having learned that many smokers don’t consider the horror of what it’s like to live with a debilitating illness, our strategy was simple: Life is awful when you have to live with a tobacco-related disease.

By featuring real former smokers who were suffering from real tobacco-related diseases in our creative, we showed smokers what could happen to them if they continued to smoke. Then we gave them tips on how to deal with their lives should they get the same diseases as the former smokers in our ads. The fact that everything in the ads was real made it harder for even the most entrenched smokers to turn away and dismiss the message.

The objective of the campaign was to get current smokers to call the quitline or visit the website to start their quit journey and ultimately quit smoking.

The results? As published in the The Lancet, the Tips From Former Smokers (Tips) campaign motivated 1.64 million Americans to make a quit attempt in 2012 and resulted in 100,000 smokers quitting for good.[4] Additionally, exposure to the Tips campaign was also associated with significant changes in beliefs about smoking-related risks and increased worries about health.[5] The campaign had further success in motivating non-smokers to communicate with family and friends about the dangers of smoking, which was a secondary aim of the campaign.

Through the years the Tips campaign continued to demonstrate strong impact. In 2014, the journal Preventing Chronic Disease reported, the Tips campaign was associated with an estimated 1.83 million additional quit attempts and 104,000 smokers quitting for good.[6]