We created a series of online films which capture the emotion of a child’s plea to a parent to quit smoking. In order to launch the video we had to prompt the viewer to click to play with audio. Here was a further opportunity to innovate.

The creative served varied depending on two criteria. Firstly, its environment: we used contextually relevant copy that referenced the placement – eg. news, sport, gossip, messaging placements.

Secondly it depended upon the degree of viewer interaction with the ads they had been exposed to up to that point. For example, had someone been exposed to the advertising with a call to action such as ‘I have a message for you, click to listen’ and not interacted, the next time they received an ad with a stronger call to action ‘You didn’t listen to me, I’m really worried about you – click to listen’.

With a recently introduced government target of halving smoking rates among routine and manual workers by 2020, this digital work marks a step change in advertising communications for the Department of Health.80% expansion rate massively outweighed average of 24%281,000 hours spent by people watching the video in our ads94% of viewers watch the films all the way throughThe most successful Smokefree digital campaign everMulti-award winner