Ventura County "Quit" campaign
Organization Information:
Organization Name
Ojai Valley Youth Foundation
Organization's Mission Statement
Connecting youth and adults for a healthy community
Organization Website
Submission Information
Impact Essay
Our message didn’t go up in smoke. Instead it reached an entire county. How do you make a new anti-smoking campaign seem fresh and make an impact? The answer was simple, by combining a talented group of teenagers and Adobe Illustrator. Generation Communication (Gen Com), a program of the non-profit Ojai Valley Youth Foundation, is a youth media agency. In the program, youth work with adult mentors in after-school internships to effect change in communities utilizing social marketing techniques. This unique program gives youth an opportunity to share their voice while developing career skills, learning the principles of graphic design and staying engaged during the critical after-school hours.
24 Gen Com youth interns, ages 12-18 years, were involved in developing Ventura County’s Quit Smoking campaign funded by Ventura County (California) tobacco settlement funds. They conceived, designed and created this campaign, a unique expression of what came to the mind of teenagers to spread the word about quitting smoking. It proved to be the right combination of colors, scary, strong imagery, impactful phrases and the right software program to make an impression on the public.
The campaign’s goal was to promote a “quit” smoking phone number. It consisted of posters displayed in all public buses throughout Ventura County reaching 3.2 million riders; 8.5” x 11” counter cards with 4 versions of 4” x 5” “rave” cards (a common form of communication among our target market) distributed to Latino neighborhood stores reaching 30,000 people; and ads placed in Ventura County publications reaching 90,000 readers. All materials were in Spanish and English.
Teens worked in Adobe Illustrator to create a “grim reaper” figure with balloons framing words that described the effects of smoking such as “premature face wrinkles”, “lung cancer”, “smelly clothes”, and “shorter lifespan”. The colors were intense including orange, deep blue, red and green combined with black. The same graphics were used on all print materials.
Prior to this high impact campaign a radio commercial promoting the “Quit” phone number received little response. Our campaign measurably increased the reach and impact of anti-smoking education and services dramatically in Ventura County. We were able to inform the community about who to call for help in quitting smoking while raising awareness about the dangers of smoking. Our teen interns were successful in not only creating visually arresting images, but in conveying a message that really got noticed. The “quit” smoking hotline in Ventura County noted that 74% of the 800 calls received did so because they got the phone number from our campaign materials.
The anti-smoking campaign really ”lit“ up our community and helped put Gen Com on the map as a teen social marketing agency. The number of projects that Gen Com is working on just keeps growing. For example we recently received a grant from the Allstate Foundation to create a disaster preparedness website in Dreamweaver. We continue to use our winning combination of Adobe products and teenagers to promote a healthy and safe lifestyle.
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quit_campaign.pdfSubmitted by OVYF on April 2, 2009 - 12:15pm