The European Union has made the fight against smoking one of its top public health priorities, because tobacco accounts for over 650,000 deaths every year in the European Union. This includes 19,000 deaths from passive smoking and these people have never even smoked!
On the 1st March 2005, the European Commission launched a large media campaign “HELP – For a life without tobacco“, which was one of the largest public health awareness-raising initiatives ever organised in the world and it was conducted in all (then) 27 EU countries.
The general motto of the campaign was to provide „Help and support“ - young people (15-34 year-olds) were the main target of the Help campaign because of their attitude that “denormalisation of smoking“ is trendy in Europe.
Few more facts:
• MTV created a TV add and website in 2006 - the purpose was to target young people and so they came up with a catch phrase „Tobacco…where do you stand?“
• Since 2006 there were online campaigns for youth in all European countries and pan-European portals such as Yahoo, MSN or Meetic.
• A powerful viral was launched in October 2007 - a fake online store www.nicomarket.com (7.5 million video views, 450,000 visits).
• A specific Internet website (www.help-eu.com) - active in 22 languages.
• There was a strong and immediate response to the broadcast of Help TV spots as they propelled visits to the www.hrlp-eu.com website: proof that the campaign was effective!
After 4 years of the campaign, the results are impressive:
There is a large media coverage with TV, press, radio and internet releases – to be more specific, there are over 6,800 articles and reports in the media since the beginning of the help campaign.
According to latest enquiry, a one third of Europeans declare to having seen the Help campaign – it is amazing!
Also7 million Internet users for the www.help-eu.com website and more than 1,100 national events performed europe-wide.
340,000 europeans measured their tobacco-related carbon monoxide levels.
4.5 billion media contacts achieved in 4 years (TV + Internet).
59% of young Europeans (under 25) saw at least 1 Help film and 82% of young Europeans liked the advert.
For the conclusion..
I would like to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.“ – this is a greate sentence which says that smoking is pointless bad habbit, which kills. I´m glad that The Help Programme was so successful!
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