PSA meets Advertainment

The fine people at the State Tobacco Education Prevention & Partnership in Colorado have come up with a great way to get a PSA (public service announcement) out to their target demographic, which in this case happens to be young adults. They are reaching out to people between the ages of 18-24 who are cigarette smokers. They have come up with a new media campaign that revolves around the Web site (and phrase) Quit Doing It. One cool fact is that they paid for the entire site, which was designed by AgencyNet and Cactus, with funds from a tobacco tax that they collected all the way back in 2004.



This snazzy, futuristic, sci-fi oriented Web site gives you the option, upon entrance to its Home Page, of choosing either a macro-Flash format, or a micro-HTML format. If your computer and browser-speed allows you to, then I would suggest checking out the Macro format, as it is a great, high-speed, fluid, and by and large well-designed flash presentation.

It starts out with a woman in a lab coat, who isn’t exactly difficult to look at, with a sexy, Elizabeth Hurly-like English accent. She comes out and explains that she has been selected to give you a tour of the “lab,” and then she basically tells you how to use the site, focusing on the “research” and “development” parts of the Web site, which each take a humorous, but informative approach to teaching the Web site viewer/participant about the negative effects of smoking. Another clever approach that is used is also voiced through the narrator. She says “At the Quit Doing It.com Labs, we are quite busy creating the most innovative tools that you can use to quit smoking. One tool we haven’t perfected yet, though, is mind reading. So, the question you have to ask yourself is: why am I here? If you’re ready to quit, check out our custom tools over in the Results department, if you’re not ready to quit yet, might I suggest checking out our research or development departments?” The “Results” section of the Web site helps the viewer/participant out by providing them with a panoply of smoking cessation tools, including another clever, relatively innovative and target-marketed media tool created by the State Tobacco Education Prevention & Partnership in Colorado: Fixnixer, a Web 2.0 program that supposedly can help you quit smoking in 21 days. But that is another story.

For me, the site was very cool. It was a fun, interactive experience. Would it actually help me quit? I dunno…but then again, I used to smoke a pack a day for five years, and then I quit last December using the patch…so…my advice, if you are seriously considering quitting smoking, would be to go to the Web site to learn a bit about the adverse effects of smoking…and have a bit of interactive fun, and then use the patch to actually quit.

Big ups to Martina over at Adverblog for making me aware of this cool new way to get kids off the ciggys.