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Challenge: The Office on Smoking and Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tasked AED with coming up with a new spin on an age-old problem – to discourage and reduce teen smoking by empowering parents to reach out to their kids.

Solution: A variety of campaign research conducted by AED – including literature reviews, analysis of lifestyle data, expert interviews, and focus groups with parents and teens -- revealed that certain parenting behaviors build children’s ability to resist using tobacco and other drugs.

AED employed a creative audience segmentation strategy that distinguished between high- and low-involvement parents, and tailored messages accordingly. Messages developed remind parents to take time out of their busy schedules, and provided these parents with specific tactics to facilitate better involvement with their teens.

This strategy proved to be vital to the successful implementation of this campaign, and led to key dissemination channels on the state level.

Results: The campaign was launched with an assortment of outreach materials including provocative print ads, radio spots, a presentation, a brochure, and a poster. The campaign materials were so successful that, in 2004, the “Got a Minute, Give it to Your Kid” web page ranked fourth out of over 3,000 pages on the Tobacco Information and Prevention Service Web site, receiving 19,022 hits. Copies of the kit essentially “sold out.”

> Download the Got a Minute project fact sheet (486 KB, PDF)

To learn more about these and other CHC programs, contact us.