The evaluation of North Carolina's state-sponsored youth tobacco prevention media campaign

Abstract

In 2003, the state of North Carolina (NC) implemented a multi-component initiative focused on teenage tobacco use prevention and cessation. One component of this initiative is Tobacco.Reality.Unfiltered. (TRU), a tobacco prevention media campaign, aimed at NC youth aged 11-17 years. This research evaluates the first 5 years of the TRU media campaign, from 2004 to 2009, using telephone surveys of NC youth. Overall, TRU campaign awareness was moderate among youth in its first year, with awareness significantly increasing over time. The majority of youth who saw the advertisements reported that they were convincing, attention grabbing and gave good reasons not to smoke. In 2009, logistic regression models revealed awareness of the TRU advertisements was associated with decreased odds of current smoking and experimenting with cigarettes for at-risk NC youth. Results from this research may help other states to define, evaluate and modify their own media campaigns, especially within financially or politically constraining environments.

Exploring How Exposure to Truth and State-Sponsored Anti-Tobacco Media Campaigns Affect Smoking Disparities among Young Adults Using a National Longitudinal Dataset, 2002–2017

“…Our longitudinal study of cohorts of 12th graders from a nationally representative sample found no evidence that greater exposure to anti-tobacco media campaigns at baseline was associated with any smoking or daily smoking initiation as youth transitioned into adulthood. Our findings are in contrast to the majority of previously published cross-sectional work, including a study analyzing cross-sectional MTF data from the same time period (2000-2015) [14], which found that higher levels of exposure to antitobacco media campaigns are generally associated with lower likelihoods of smoking intentions [3,6,7,14,30], smoking participation [5][6][7]14,[31][32][33][34][35][36], and first cigarette initiation [14]. Only one study to date has analyzed the impact of campaign exposure on daily smoking initiation among youth and found no significant cross-sectional association between the two among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders [14].…”

Using Mass Media Campaigns to Reduce Youth Tobacco Use: A Review

“…13 Studies of other state campaigns are less rigorous because outcomes are not directly linked with exposure to a media campaign 2,9 or because measures of race/ethnicity were dichotomous (white versus non-white) and intended only as control variables. 14,35 A controlled field experiment designed to evaluate the effect of a 9-month media campaign in four designated market areas in Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin showed that, although there was no overall campaign effect, there was a marginally statistically significant association between living in an intervention media market and current smoking among Hispanic youth (p ¼ .09). 33…”

“…43,48 ''Health consequences'' was the dominant theme of the effective Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Australia campaigns. 5,14,27,35,50 Evaluations of those campaigns are not included in this analysis because they do not advance our understanding of the effectiveness of this message theme over and above other campaign and ad characteristics. This is because they assess the effectiveness of the campaigns as a whole, without seeking to isolate the role played by the message theme.…”

Impact of a negative emotional antitobacco mass media campaign on French smokers: a longitudinal study

“…For instance, the national US campaign launched by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  called ‘Tips From Former Smokers’ that depicted smoking-related suffering in real people was effective in increasing population-level quit attempts,12 and the personal testimonials campaign (‘TRU’) delivered in North Carolina about negative consequences of tobacco on the smokers’ family decreased smoking prevalence among youths 13. Regarding the use of shocking images, the original versions of the ‘Sponge’ Australian advertisement (1983) and of the Australian ‘Artery’ campaign (1997) were associated respectively with a 3.4%14 and a 1.4% decline in smoking prevalence 15.…”