SKY Girls Tobacco Prevention Campaign (Botswana and Ghana)
Summary:
SKY Girls is a tobacco control multimedia campaign that aims to strip out the aspiration from smoking among teenage girls in Botswana and Ghana. The campaign's core insight is that teenage girls already know the health dangers of smoking, but may start smoking anyway, due to influence from tobacco company advertising and social pressure from their peers. The SKY Girls campaign aims to reverse this trend, by subtly using multimedia products to influence the teenage girls away from smoking, using social levers. The campaign uses channels including a magazine (click here to access Issue 17), radio shows, vlogs, a radio drama and 2 feature-length movies. All these multimedia products aim to entertain, first and foremost. The strategy is to draw the audience towards the entertaining brand through strong visuals, exciting content and entertaining storylines. Once the audience has been drawn towards the brand, the anti-tobacco message is seeded into the existing multimedia using positive reinforcements, for example having the coolest characters in a drama reject tobacco as being not cool enough for her'. The different multimedia products also work in unison, for example the radio drama having a spin-off comic strip that features in the magazine. One of the most important elements of the multimedia strategy is that we don't cut corners just because our audience is young, or because this is a behaviour change campaign. By ensuring all our multimedia products are of the highest quality, we compete with the biggest brands in entertainment and win a bigger share of the audience.
Background/Objectives:
We were tasked by Good Business UK (a grantee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) to prevent a predicted uptake of smoking among adolescent girls in Botswana and Ghana. The girls already knew the health dangers of smoking, but some were tempted to take it up anyway for social reasons, or because of peer pressure. To tackle this, we created an empowerment brand that was content-led. This brand had to be attractive and entertaining enough to draw teenagers towards it. Once they were fans of the brand, we would gradually start seeding in anti-tobacco messaging.
Results/Lessons Learned:
This audience can sniff out inauthenticity easily, so we had to make sure we were talking their language. Once we started involving girls in the cocreation process, we started seeing great results. SKY Girls became the hottest brand and girls wanted to be associated with it. We realised that the most important thing to the girls is that our content was interesting, and relevant to them. They also wanted to see their peers on our platforms, so we held competitions to appear in the magazine, on TV and in our radio dramas. In our Botswana endline research with over 1500 people, 95% of the target audience were aware of the brand. Most importantly, 82% said SKY had helped them to feel confident that they could refuse a cigarette. We believe this is because our multimedia outputs provided models for aspirational, entertaining and attractive young women who refused tobacco.
Discussion/Implications for the Field:
The success of this campaign demonstrates how much impact can be made when you reach your audience in the places where they are, with content that they find exciting and attractive. By creating some of the best-looking magazines and the most exciting radio dramas and movies in the country, we drew the audience close to us, so they would hear our message when we chose to transmit it. The same technique could be used for a wide range of campaigns, and seems to be especially effective when targeting young people who are often neglected by mainstream entertainment.
Abstract submitted by:
Elle Brooks - The Dialogue Group
Kofi Ocloo - Now Available Africa
Yvonne Acheampong - Now Available Africa
Gaone Manatong - The Dialogue Group
SKY Girls is a tobacco control multimedia campaign that aims to strip out the aspiration from smoking among teenage girls in Botswana and Ghana. The campaign's core insight is that teenage girls already know the health dangers of smoking, but may start smoking anyway, due to influence from tobacco company advertising and social pressure from their peers. The SKY Girls campaign aims to reverse this trend, by subtly using multimedia products to influence the teenage girls away from smoking, using social levers. The campaign uses channels including a magazine (click here to access Issue 17), radio shows, vlogs, a radio drama and 2 feature-length movies. All these multimedia products aim to entertain, first and foremost. The strategy is to draw the audience towards the entertaining brand through strong visuals, exciting content and entertaining storylines. Once the audience has been drawn towards the brand, the anti-tobacco message is seeded into the existing multimedia using positive reinforcements, for example having the coolest characters in a drama reject tobacco as being not cool enough for her'. The different multimedia products also work in unison, for example the radio drama having a spin-off comic strip that features in the magazine. One of the most important elements of the multimedia strategy is that we don't cut corners just because our audience is young, or because this is a behaviour change campaign. By ensuring all our multimedia products are of the highest quality, we compete with the biggest brands in entertainment and win a bigger share of the audience.
Background/Objectives:
We were tasked by Good Business UK (a grantee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) to prevent a predicted uptake of smoking among adolescent girls in Botswana and Ghana. The girls already knew the health dangers of smoking, but some were tempted to take it up anyway for social reasons, or because of peer pressure. To tackle this, we created an empowerment brand that was content-led. This brand had to be attractive and entertaining enough to draw teenagers towards it. Once they were fans of the brand, we would gradually start seeding in anti-tobacco messaging.
Results/Lessons Learned:
This audience can sniff out inauthenticity easily, so we had to make sure we were talking their language. Once we started involving girls in the cocreation process, we started seeing great results. SKY Girls became the hottest brand and girls wanted to be associated with it. We realised that the most important thing to the girls is that our content was interesting, and relevant to them. They also wanted to see their peers on our platforms, so we held competitions to appear in the magazine, on TV and in our radio dramas. In our Botswana endline research with over 1500 people, 95% of the target audience were aware of the brand. Most importantly, 82% said SKY had helped them to feel confident that they could refuse a cigarette. We believe this is because our multimedia outputs provided models for aspirational, entertaining and attractive young women who refused tobacco.
Discussion/Implications for the Field:
The success of this campaign demonstrates how much impact can be made when you reach your audience in the places where they are, with content that they find exciting and attractive. By creating some of the best-looking magazines and the most exciting radio dramas and movies in the country, we drew the audience close to us, so they would hear our message when we chose to transmit it. The same technique could be used for a wide range of campaigns, and seems to be especially effective when targeting young people who are often neglected by mainstream entertainment.
Abstract submitted by:
Elle Brooks - The Dialogue Group
Kofi Ocloo - Now Available Africa
Yvonne Acheampong - Now Available Africa
Gaone Manatong - The Dialogue Group
Source
Approved abstract for the postponed 2020 SBCC Summit in Marrakech, Morocco. Provided by the International Steering Committee for the Summit. Image credit: SKY Girls via Facebook