united future a wongdoody agency

Join the Mob

How do you get teens to stop smoking? United Future and WONGDOODY helped the Washington State Department of Health do just that, by making smokers social outcasts.

90% of adult smokers start as teenagers. Keep kids from saying “yes,” and we’ll save lives. The problem is, young teens are all about brands. And tobacco’s got some huge ones.

The Goal - Get the world’s most image-conscious target - teens - to embrace “no” as a hot brand and engage them online.

To do that, we turned to fashion and social networking.

15 spots introduced the “No Stank You” brand and each spot ended with an offer to get a free T-shirt at NoStankYou.com, where kids could join the “MOB” and get a full line of free “No Stank You” fashion tees.

To get a free tee, kids were invited to become No Stank You creators, ambassadors and models. After joining the No Stank You online MOB, kids earned points toward free tees by submitting their own shirt designs, rating and commenting on designs and submitting photos online of themselves wearing No Stank You tees (which later cycled back into further TV Spots). This led to recruitment of their friends by posting No Stank You banners on their personal Web sites and social networks - allowing the No Stank You brand to spread through their network of friends.

In the first seven months of the campaign, the site received more than 392,000 visits from Washington state kids, 46% of them being referred through other kids’ Web sites.

Kids are spending more than 7 minutes per visit on the site, soaking up loads of anti-tobacco messaging.

We’ve received more than 19,000 user-submitted shirt designs and mailed out more than 20,000 shirts.

Unaided recall of No Stank You is at 74%. And it’s helped reduce smoking among Washington’s 8th-graders by 60%.