Smoking Kid

Why it works

A hidden-camera film in which small children, cigarettes in hand, walk up to adult smokers outside office buildings and ask for a light. Every smoker refuses and lectures them about cancer and dying young; the children then ask why the adults smoke and hand over a note reading “You worry about me, but why not about yourself?”, with the number of Thailand’s 1600 quitline. Made by Ogilvy & Mather Bangkok for the Thai Health Promotion Foundation and released on YouTube in June 2012, it is studied because it makes the smoker’s own words the warning, sidestepping scare tactics smokers had learned to ignore. Within days, The Drum was reporting a 40 per cent rise in quitline calls. The agency’s effectiveness paper claims a $5,000 budget, no paid media, more than five million views in ten days and a 62 per cent jump in completed calls in the launch month. It won a One Show Gold Pencil in 2013 and a Gold at the APAC Effies.