Ninety percent of adult smokers start as teenagers. Keeping kids from saying "yes" will save lives. The problem is, young teens are all about brands. And tobacco's got some huge ones. Our challenge: Get the world's most image-conscious target — teens — to embrace "no" as a hot brand. To do that, we turned to fashion and social networking.

At NoStankYou.com, kids found a full line of free "No Stank You" fashion tees. These were more than wearable No Stank You billboards. They were high-impact educational tools. Anti-tobacco facts inside of each shirt. So every time kids put on the shirts, they got a reminder of how bad tobacco is for them. To get a free tee, kids were invited to become No Stank You creators, ambassadors and models. After joining No Stank You on the website, kids earned points toward free tees by submitting their own shirt designs, rating and commenting on designs, submitting photos of themselves wearing No Stank You tees and recruiting their friends by posting No Stank You banners on their personal websites — which allowed the No Stank You brand to spread throughout their social networks.

The results of the No Stank You campaign were a welcome hit to teen tobacco use:

• In the first seven months of the campaign, the site received over 392,000 visits from kids in Washington state, 46 percent of them being referred through social networks.
• Kids spent over eight minutes per visit on the site, interacting with each other and soaking up loads of anti-tobacco messaging.
• We registered over 77,750 No Stank You members and received over 23,000 user-submitted shirt designs.