It's been widely accepted by teens that smoking cigarettes is bad. (Duh.) But social smoking is on the rise. Social smoking is loosely defined as situations and surroundings that give people an excuse/justification for why they're not a smoker-smoker, they just smoke at parties/when they're taking a study break/when they need to look busy. They maybe don't buy their own packs. They don't think they're addicted. Social smokers definitely don't want to be labeled as smokers.
But social smokers are still smokers. And nobody benefits more from the ambiguity than Big Tobacco, since half of all people who try smoking in college still smoke four years later.
Our goal was to use memes to start a conversation about all the social smoking traps that people can fall into when they're younger, which can lead to them being what they'd actually consider a smoker-smoker after college: pack-a-day people who neeeeeed that cigarette. By starting these conversations, we're able to spread facts and knowledge that saves lives.
We wanted to start a conversation about social smoking traps that would help teens identify what social smoking traps actually are, and find a way to connect social smoking with the likelihood of being a smoker-smoker years later.
To get people talking, we pulled together some of the most ridiculous memes from the Internet and brought them to life on TV: Ermahgerd girl, Joseph Ducreux, a unicorn puking rainbows, Overly Attached Girlfriend and the interrupting seal.
We used each meme to nod to a different meme--It's a Trap--in order to tie together multiple social smoking excuses, from the guy that was going to do yoga tomorrow to the girl who only smokes on Saturdays. We highlighted each one as a social smoking trap, and made it clear that social smoking is still smoking.
To spark the initial conversation, we launched #ItsATrap during the VMAs, when we knew our 12-24 year old demographic would be watching.
After seeing the ads, there was 83% awareness from our demo that a significant amount of people who start smoking in college still smoke after they graduate. This is hugely important to our cause, because it shows that using memes caught people's attention, got them talking and helped us define social smoking as smoking.
Throughout the campaign, we had more than 51 million video views of the ad and saw more than 25,000 campaign-related uses of the #ItsATrap hashtag.
By utilizing sharable memes, we were able to spread our life-saving message in a way that felt natural to our audience--not preachy.
