Targeting young people to highlight the dangers of smoking.  When all previous anti-smoking messages aimed at teenagers had failed this called for a radical new approach.

Q.  How do you persuade teenagers not to smoke?

A.  We began by sending every secondary school in the UK information packs which included a questionnaire and details of our website - designed for schools to use as an online resource.

We asked young people to share their thoughts and ran a serise of focus groups for 14 to 18 year olds.  Our research showed TV to be the most effective medium to deliver our message, with 80 per cent of teenagers contacted watching more hours of TV a week than the national average.

We then set up a nationwide competition, inviting our core audience to send us their ideas for a series of new anti-smoking TV ads.  We received over two thousand entries.

The winning entry, entitled 'Serial Killer', was produced for national television.  It identifies smoking and the tobacco industry as by far the largest serial killers in the history of the world.

Backed-up by a poster campaign, the first ad was screened on March 14th - National Stop Smoking Day - in the centre break of Hollyoaks with sponsorship from Channel 4.

Result?

The day after the ad was aired, over a thousand teenagers contacted Cancer Research UK to request more information.  And that was just the begining.  In the following weeks the ad reached an estimated worldwide audience of over 50 million young people.

The PR value for Cancer Research UK after the campaign broke has been huge, even reaching America, where NBC ran a special feature on the project.  It was also featured in media in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and Italy.  Within nine months the project had positioned Cancer Research UK as a 'switched on' charity that really empathises with teenagers.  The success of this project has spawned other successful campaigns targeting teenagers, relating to healthy eating and exercise.