truth is no stranger to the task of making a less-than-riveting topic -- tobacco -- interesting and relevant to a teen audience. But in 2017, we had to expose the fact that Big Tobacco was forced to issue a legally-mandated apology and admit to decades of purposefully defrauding the American public about the deadliness and addictiveness of its products. Not only was that a mouthful, it was the result of a decades-long lawsuit that was riddled with delays, legal jargon, and slightly boring details. Ultimately, the legally-mandated apologies could not have been less noticeable. They featured black and white text, a boring voiceover, and aired at odd times on networks our teen audience barely watched. We know outrage toward the tobacco industry can directly affect a young person's intention to start smoking, so we needed them to hear the truth about Big Tobacco's deceptive history loud and clear. So we decided to write a country song with CollegeHumor, an integrated marketing partner, parodying the sad, sorry words of the tobacco industry. CollegeHumor's benchmarks for engagement were 6,200 on YouTube and 5,000 on Facebook. We wanted to at least double each. Plus, we didn't want our parody apology to slip under the radar like Big Tobacco's real statements. We needed as many eyes on this video as possible, so we set a goal of garnering at least 2 million views across Facebook and YouTube. |
The country song needed to be a few things: informative, viral, and funny. We set out to tell the story of a Big Tobacco exec who's really, awfully sorry for lying to the American people about the deadliness and addictiveness of his products. His apology is about as sincere as you'd expect from a person making a legally-mandated apology. We made this sad, sorry country song parody as authentic as possible by enlisting seasoned Nashville songwriters and real country music video producers -- and it worked. Our country music video was so authentic, we even had dozens of social media comments asking us to upload the track to Spotify. On the day we released the video, we employed a homepage takeover on CollegeHumor's website -- a website we know is frequented by our target age demographic of 18 to 24 year olds -- driving to the video. We wanted as many eyes on this musical apology as possible. |
Big Tobacco's black-and-white, boring apology might have floated by unseen -- but our country music remake certainly didn't. We set a goal of garnering 2 million video views. Ultimately, we blew past that with 4.36 million total video views on Facebook and YouTube. We wanted to double CollegeHumor's engagement benchmark of 6,200 on YouTube and 5,000 on Facebook. We nearly tripled that on YouTube with 18,034 engagements, and more than tripled it on Facebook with 20,400 engagements. In total, this video saw 38,434 engagements on both platforms. Not only did our content drive views and engagements, but pre-market forced exposure studies showed that we also changed attitudes and perceptions toward Big Tobacco. We saw a 44% increase in viewers who strongly agreed with the sentiment, "tobacco companies can't be trusted," after seeing the video. Plus, 67% of viewers who saw the video agreed with the statement, "Big Tobacco spent decades lying to Americans about the deadliness and addictiveness of their products." When told through our content, Big Tobacco's confession didn't go unseen. Considering our overarching goal of stroking outrage toward the tobacco industry and keeping first-time, teen smokers from ever picking up a cigarette, we'd consider this partnership a honky tonkin' success.
