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New ads for the California State Anti-Smoking campaign are set to launch Feb. 4, by Livingston + Keye/L.A., after a 9-month-long hiatus due in part to the governor’s attempt to pull funding for the program. That move spawned a lawsuit, which was resolved in June when funding was reestablished.
‘The media campaign worked and when the government suspended the campaign, the effectiveness went away,’ said Stanton Glantz, Ph.D., UCSF professor of medicine, author of the study.
The study found that from 1981-88, cigarette consumption was falling by 45.9 million packs a year. After Prop. 99, the initiative that instituted a 25-cent tax on cigarettes and earmarked the money for an anti-smoking ad campaign, the rate of decline tripled to 164.3 million packs per year. If there had never been a Prop. 99 initiative, Glantz said that the tobacco industry would have sold an additional 802 million packs of cigarettes, or an estimated $1.1 billion in pre-tax sales. In 1992, after the campaign was suspended, the decline dropped to 19.4 million packs.
Jacquolyn Duerr, chief of the media campaign tobacco control program, at the California Department of Health Services, said another reason there were few ads since June was the need to conduct research on the effectiveness of the campaign. That research, she said, had to be conducted during a hiatus.
From 1990 to the end of 1991 the state spent $28.6 million for advertising. She expects to spend about the same amount in a similar time period.
The new campaign will focus on prevention, said Roger Livingston, president of L + K, targeting the general public, teens and young women.
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