Antismoking ads that curb teen smoking

Messages that work change attitudes about what's `normative.'

By Beth Azar
Monitor staff

The black lungs, cancer and emphysema caused by smoking are the best reasons why children shouldn't start to smoke, but those images don't prevent them from picking up cigarettes, according to research by behavioral scientists. Instead, the most successful antismoking advertisements provide nonsmoking peer role models and demonstrate how second-hand smoke harms family and friends.

These findings-that only certain types of advertisements change adolescents' desires to smoke-are critical if state health agencies hope to design successful antismoking campaigns. Although states are beginning to put more money into such efforts cigarette advertising still dwarfs even the most extravagant antismoking advertising campaigns.

That means that what money is spent on antismoking advertising has got to have the biggest possible impact. And research by psychologists is pointing the way.

Examining what works

Cigarette advertising dissolves children's resistance to smoking with entertaining graphics-such as Joe Camel-that present smoking as fun, cool and a normal part of living the 'good life,' says psychologist John Pierce, PhD, of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the University of California, San Diego. 'Advertising reduces the concept that experimenting is dangerous,' he says. By junior high school 'kids think it's OK to experiment. And that's the first chink in their armor.'

According to Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory, the best way to change behavior is to shift people's overall image of what behaviors are 'normal' and valuable within one's peer group. Children exposed to an advertising campaign that did just that-using a variety of commercials featuring nonsmoking role models-were less likely to smoke four years later than children not exposed to the campaign, found Kim Worden, PhD, and Brian Flynn of the Office of Health Promotion Research at the University of Vermont. They followed more than 5,000 children in Vermont, upstate New York and Montana, half of whom heard the advertising campaign on radio and television and participated in a school-based antismoking program and half of whom only participated in the school program.

Instead of teaching children about the health hazards of smoking or the ways cigarette manufacturers manipulate people through marketing, the commercials feature adolescents who enjoy life without smoking, who demonstrate how to refuse a cigarette and who emphasize that most children don't smoke and don't approve of smoking.

Such modeling is extremely effective in influencing adolescents' intentions to smoke, finds psychologist Cornelia Pechmann, PhD, associate professor of marketing at the University of California, Irvine. In a new and as yet unpublished study, she and Pennsylvania State University Bard professor of marketing Marvin Goldberg, PhD, tested the effectiveness of 196 antismoking ads on 1,658 seventh and 10th graders.

Out of seven general types of advertisements only three effectively curbed the adolescents' desires to smoke over the next year, says Pechmann.

Two of those three ad types targeted children's perceptions of what their peers think about smoking: ads that show peers who think smokers are misguided and ads that show young people choosing not to smoke. The third effective type of commercial shows how smokers endanger their family members through second-hand smoke.

Ads that provide children with peer role models worked best, even though they were the oldest of the advertisements she used. Created by Worden's team in the early 1980s. These ads portrayed children from Vermont who didn't exactly mirror the mixed-race city children of Orange County, Calif., who Pechmann surveyed in her study.

'It's just amazing,' says Pechmann. 'We really wanted the health-related messages to work, but they didn't. Kim Worden's ads were really low budget. But they worked the best despite that.'

Lisa Goldman and Stanton Glantz, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco, found a similar pattern of effective antismoking advertising. They reviewed the outcomes of focus group studies evaluating advertisements used in antismoking campaigns (Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 297, No. 10, p. 772-777). However, Pechmann and Goldberg found that revealing the tactics of cigarette advertisements had no effect on children's intent to smoke, while Glantz and Goldman reported that such advertisements-called 'industry manipulation'-were highly effective.

It may be that Glantz and Goldman picked up an inherent appeal of industry manipulation ads, says Pechmann. She too found that children thought such ads were provocative. However, like health-oriented advertisements, the industry-related ads did not affect intent to smoke-arguably the best measure of ad effectiveness.

The idea that ads must be more than engaging has broad implications for antismoking campaigns around the country, say researchers. Antismoking messages must not only grab their audience, but provide them with a notion that helps them change their attitude about what's normative-smoking or not smoking.

Right now 'the [tobacco] industry has the normative ground and we don't,' says Pierce, referring to his findings that most adolescents have a favorite cigarette advertisement, but none have a favorite antismoking ad. Until that changes, children will continue to experiment with smoking.



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