Impact of a national tobacco education campaign on weekly numbers of quitline calls and website visitors--United States, March 4-June 23, 2013

Abstract

During March 4-June 23, 2013, CDC conducted its second annual national paid-media tobacco education campaign encouraging adult smokers to quit. These campaigns, called Tips from Former Smokers (Tips), feature true stories of former smokers living with serious smoking-related diseases. To assess the immediate impact of the 2013 Tips campaign, CDC analyzed the weekly numbers of calls to the national telephone quitline portal (1-800-QUIT-NOW) and the weekly numbers of unique visitors to the Tips website (http://www.cdc.gov/tips)* during the 16-week campaign and during the 4 weeks before and after the campaign. During the campaign, the average weekly numbers of calls and website visitors increased by 75% and almost 38-fold, respectively, compared with the 4 weeks before the campaign, and quickly decreased almost to pre-campaign levels once the campaign ended. This suggests that the campaign led to 151,536 additional quitline calls and nearly 2.8 million additional unique Tips website visitors above pre-campaign levels. During the first 12 weeks of the campaign,† when the national television ads were on and off air on alternate weeks, average weekly call volume fell by 38% during the 6 weeks when the national television ads were off air compared with the 6 weeks when these ads were running. These results suggest that emotionally evocative tobacco education media campaigns featuring graphic images of the health effects of smoking can increase quitline calls and website visits and that these campaigns' effects decrease rapidly once they are discontinued.

FIGURE 1

Number of weekly telephone calls made to 1-800-QUIT-NOW before, during, and after CDC’s 2013 Tips from Former Smokers campaign — United States, February 4–July 21, 2013* * For the week of May 27–June 2, the national television ads were running, but most of these ads featured the message “You can quit – talk with your doctor for help.” For the weeks of June 3–9, June 10–16, and June 17–23, a substantial proportion of online ads were tagged with 1-800-QUIT-NOW. For the week of June 24–30, some television stations continued to run ads for a short period after the campaign ended.

FIGURE 2

Number of weekly unique visitors to campaign websites before, during, and after CDC’s 2013 Tips from Former Smokers campaign — February 4–July 21, 2013* * For the week of April 22–28, YouTube mistakenly ran substantially more online ads than were purchased. For the week of May 27–June 2, the national television ads were running, but most of these ads featured the message “You can quit – talk with your doctor for help.” For the weeks of June 3–9, June 10–16, and June 17–23, a substantial proportion of online ads were tagged with 1-800-QUIT-NOW rather than the website address. For the week of June 17–23, online ad impressions were run at an especially high level. For the week of June 24–30, some ad servers continued to run online ads for a short period after the campaign ended.