The Tips from Former Smokers television campaign, which features
true stories of former smokers living with the unfortunate consequences
of their past habit, appears to motivate smokers to seek information
through quitlines and the Internet, according to a report published in
the Sept. 20 issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
THURSDAY, Sept. 19 (HealthDay News) -- The Tips from Former
Smokers (Tips) television campaign, which features true stories of
former smokers living with the unfortunate consequences of their past
habit, appears to motivate smokers to seek information through quitlines
and the Internet, according to a report published in the Sept. 20 issue
of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
In an effort to assess the Tips campaign's impact, Stephen Babb,
M.P.H., of the CDC in Atlanta, and colleagues analyzed the number of
weekly calls to the national telephone quitline and the number of weekly
new visitors to the Tips website during the four weeks prior to the
campaign, the 16 weeks of the campaign's duration, and the four weeks
that followed.
Calls and website visits increased by 75 percent during the campaign
and quickly fell to almost pre-campaign levels afterward. The
researchers surmised that the campaign inspired an additional 151,536
callers and nearly 2.8 million unique web visitors above non-campaign
levels. Furthermore, weekly call volumes fluctuated wildly, falling 38
percent during the six weeks when televised ads did not run.
"These results suggest that emotionally evocative tobacco education
media campaigns featuring graphic images of the health effects of
smoking can increase quitline calls and website visits and that these
campaigns' effects decrease rapidly once they are discontinued," the
authors write.
