The Health Promotion Agency were looking to use social media to grow awareness of the Smokefree 2025 concept, and promote the vision that being smokefree is ‘normal’.
The target audience were:
- 13-30 years old, especially among Māori and Pasifika.
- Low socio-economic suburbs throughout New Zealand
- Current smokers, and people who can influence smokers
The objective was to reach this audience with smokefree messages. The challenge was to not “sound like Government” in order to engage them and build conversations.
We ran an initial workshop with HPA staff before campaign launch to collaboratively develop the concepts that were most likely to engage our audience. We then tested, refined, and evolved the creative strategy based on data (monthly reporting of engagement). We provided added value by going to the street and doing photoshoots, as well as recording interviews with individuals in the target demographic. This was not part of the brief but we saw this as a way to produce realistic and relatable content for our audience.
Engaging Youth is a challenge. To enhance engagement we produced videos, GIFs, animations, photoshoots and vox-pop interviews rather than relying on static posts and advertising content. Over the campaign we learnt that producing content involving memes, pop-culture, and the latest internet references related to smoking, meant we could then drop in HPA’s smokefree messages while receiving similar engagement figures. We were able to reach approximately 100,000 New Zealanders per month of the targeted demographic in high smoking areas. Our monthly production cycles ensured that HPA were seeing planned content to meet their objectives rather than having to approve individual pieces without context. This allowed for better conversations between us and allowed us to try different directions.
