ATLANTA -- Even as the U.S. Food & Drug Administration has decided not to appeal a U.S. Supreme Court decision blocking new graphic warning labels on cigarette packages, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) has debuted a second series of ads in its "Tips from Former Smokers" campaign that it launched last year.
The ads, funded by the Affordable Care Act's Prevention & Public Health Fund, feature graphic stories of former smokers living with smoking-related diseases and disabilities.
The ads will run for at least 12 weeks on TV, radio and billboards, online and in theaters, magazines and newspapers nationwide. An Associated Press report said the ads cost $48 million. Last year's similar $54 million campaign was the agency's first and largest national advertising effort, said the report.
The messages in these new ads are emotional, telling the story of how real people's lives were changed forever due to their smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke, CDC said. The ads encourage smokers to call a toll-free number to access quit support across the country or to visit www.cdc.gov/tips to view the stories from the campaign.
"The Tips from Former Smokers campaign shows the painful effects of smoking through former smokers, in a way that numbers alone cannot," said CDC director Tom Frieden. "These are the kinds of ads that smokers tell us help motivate them to quit."
Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius claimed that "the increase in calls to quitlines after last year's campaign shows that more people are trying to quit smoking as a result of these ads."
The new ads feature Tiffany, who lost her mother when she was 16 to lung cancer, and recently quit smoking herself as her own daughter turned 16 because she did not want her daughter to suffer the way she did; Bill, a 40-year-old with diabetes whose smoking led to heart surgery, blindness in one eye, amputation and kidney failure; Michael, who suffers from COPD, and is agonizing about how to tell his grandson he may not be around to share his life much longer; and Nathan, who suffered severe lung damage from secondhand smoke exposure at work. And, a new ad featuring Terrie, who appeared in last year's ads showing what a head and neck cancer survivor has to do to "get ready for the day," and who wishes she had recorded her voice before she had to have her voicebox removed, since her grandson has never heard any voice but her current one.
The ads that ran last year had immediate and strong impact, said the CDC. Compared with the same 12-week period in 2011, overall call volume to the quit line more than doubled during the campaign, and visits to the campaign website for quit help increased by more than five times, it said.
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